Comments on: Increase speed and reduce bandwidth usage

By: Cristian Neagu

Cristian Neagu — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:32:06 +0000

[...] original article was written by Federico Cargnelutti and I consider it very good and blog [...]

By: Federico

Federico — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:52:07 +0000

The post has now been updated.

By: Federico

Federico — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:34:58 +0000

Yes, you are right. I’m going to edit the post and some of my comments.

So basically there are 2 methods for compressing the content:

1. Using Apache: Enable and configure mod_deflate and the server will automatically encoded the content and set the appropriate headers.
2. Using PHP: Encode the content and manually set the headers in the application.

Barry, Ondrej, Fake51 and Tim: Thanks for the corrections and extra info!

By: Tim Fountain

Tim Fountain — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:00:45 +0000

This has been my experience as well. Including:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

in the vhost is enough to compress any text/html content (including PHP output), and set all the appropriate headers.

I’ve been using it for a while on both Ubuntu and CentOS servers and have never done anything like you have in step 3.

By: Ondrej Ivanic

Ondrej Ivanic — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:41:00 +0000

As usual I forgot something:
Content negotiation (step 3 in your sample) is provided by mod_negotiation which is compiled by default in to Apache 2.0 or higher.

By: Ondrej Ivanic

Ondrej Ivanic — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:37:47 +0000

@Federico
As Fake51 mentioned Apache 2.0 (and higher) should this do automatically when you turn on mod_deflate and the output from the php script has correct Content-type header.

By: Federico

Federico — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:15:58 +0000

@Ondrej Are you saying that if you enable and configure the deflate module in Apache the output is automatically encoded and the headers automatically added regardless of the web server and operating system you are using?

By: Ondrej

Ondrej — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:38:55 +0000

@Federico
I forgot emphasize main idea that you don’t have to do anything which is mentioned in the step 3 when you set the correct Content-type header (and you have proper setup).

By: Fake51

Fake51 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:10:02 +0000

It’s not special to Ubuntu 9.04. I would rather expect it to be related to Apache version – I’ve set up mod_deflate for an Apache 2, Debian 4 install, gzip compression was handled automatically with no php intervention.

By: Federico

Federico — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:25:23 +0000

@Ondrej

I’m using Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 8.04. I didn’t know 9.04 enabled the module by default (it makes sense), thanks for the tip. However, I do recommend having some guidelines for increasing portability during each of the key activities of development and maintenance, such as setting headers and compressing output.