Home

mod_gzip, make websites 50-90% faster (and use less bandwidth) on the fly

Thu, 07/12/2001 - 09:28 — charlie.collins

Wow. It seems to good to be true, and maybe everyone else already knows about mod_gzip, but I just discovered it. I knew a little about HTTP compression, but I had not ever heard of mod_gzip itself.

mod_gzip is simple. It is a compression mod for apache that uses the standard zlib compression library to compress output. How is that you ask? It simply checks the user-agent and sends a compressed version of the response to those who can process it. For some time most modern browsers have been capable of handling compression.
Its really straightforward, if the user agent has the "content-encoding" header then its game on, compression away.

This means no extra client side stuff is needed. Simply make text 90% or so smaller and images 50% or so smaller (depending on how much they are compressed already) by installing one mod on the web server!

Again, very cool, wow. I am installing it on several web servers now for testing, but if it lives up to its simple yet ultra effective claims it will be standard on every apache box I build. Also, a tutorial will be added here with my results.

Get it via the link.   mod_gzip

Comments

Thu, 07/12/2001 - 19:10 — atrox (not verified)

Re: mod_gzip, make websites 50-90% faster (and use less bandwid

one caveat i have discovered with mod_gzip, most proxy servers dont support the header that it needs to perform the encryption (the user agent saying it can support encryption) so not all clients will get the benefit (and its sketchy as to whether or not it will cooperate with mod_proxy)

also, it logs great, check the logs to see whats getting the compression and how much

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.