Home ›

Compressing Web Content with mod_gzip and mod_deflate

Issue 114

From Issue #114
October 2003

Apr 26, 2004  By Stephen Pierzchala
 in
Compressing Web content can produce a much faster site for users. Here's how to set it up and measure your success.
Conclusion

With a few simple commands and a little bit of configuration, an Apache Web server can deliver a large amount of content in a compressed format. These benefits are not simply limited to static pages; dynamic pages generated by PHP and to other dynamic content generators can be compressed by using the Apache compression modules. When added other performance-tuning mechanisms and appropriate server-side caching rules, these modules can reduce substantially necessary bandwidth for a very low cost.

Resources

mod_gzip: the Apache 1.3.x version is located at sourceforge.net/projects/mod-gzip, and the Apache 2.0.x version is located at www.gknw.de/development/apache/httpd-2.0/unix/modules.

Stephen Pierzchala is senior diagnostic analyst for Keynote Systems in San Mateo, California. His focus is on analyzing Web performance data and evangelizing on Web performance topics, such as content compression, caching and persistent connections. He can be contacted at stephen@pierzchala.com.

______________________

Comments

Comment viewing options

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

I had no idea you could do

David Hops's picture
Submitted by David Hops (not verified) on Sat, 04/04/2009 - 07:16.

I had no idea you could do this. Should come in handy as I don't have much bandwidth at the moment and am hosting a few large images and zips. Only concern would be extra CPU load.

Great article, thank you for

Webtiful Search Engine SEO's picture
Submitted by Webtiful Search Engine SEO (not verified) on Thu, 02/26/2009 - 13:50.

Great article, thank you for sharing.

mod_deflate

Mikhailov Anatoly's picture
Submitted by Mikhailov Anatoly (not verified) on Tue, 12/16/2008 - 08:16.

Article about mod_deflate settings like on Amazon EC2 AMI
http://railsgeek.com/2008/12/16/apache2-httpd-improving-performance-mod_...

Nice Work!

Fargham's picture
Submitted by Fargham (not verified) on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 08:24.

A great and informative article!

Really helped me!!

Ashutosh Chaturvedi's picture
Submitted by Ashutosh Chaturvedi (not verified) on Fri, 01/04/2008 - 00:43.

Hi,

It's really a great artical and really helped me. One question from myside is..

Is there anyway of copressing .tiff files by using mod_gzip??

Plz help me, if anyone has idea about the same.

Thanks in advance..

Ashutosh

Brain Cancers

seda's picture
Submitted by seda (not verified) on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 03:58.

I read your article.The things you have written sound very sincere and nice topics i am looking forward to its continuation.

Re: Compressing Web Content

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 04/30/2004 - 02:00.

stephen,
good article summarizing the methods and benefits of compressing web pages. however, you should touch on the difficulty of using mod_gzip with mod_ssl under apache 1.3.x -- this is a cumbersome issue and there are only workaround solutions. one such is to use a mod_proxy frontend virtual server to buffer the ssl request, and a mod_gzip backend virtual server to handle the compression. more detail on this two stage approach is here:
http://lists.over.net/pipermail/mod_gzip/2002-February/005911.html
i have implemented the above method on a few production servers and it does indeed work, with some caveats.

i believe that i read somewhere that apache 2.x had improved handling of the gzip/ssl pairing. not having played with 2.x i'm not in a position to say whether or not it actually works. perhaps someone could comment on this.

regards,
jim

At what cost to the CPU

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 04/30/2004 - 02:00.

Great article! I enjoyed reading it and found it very informative. One question though...

What will this module do to my CPU? Will the load average on my box go through the roof everytime I need to send out a compressed webpage? I think this would have been a nice point to look at as part of your article.

Really helped me!!

Ashutosh Chaturvedi's picture
Submitted by Ashutosh Chaturvedi (not verified) on Fri, 01/04/2008 - 00:39.

Hi,

It's really a great artical and really helped me. One question from myside is..

Is there anyway of copressing .tiff files by using mod_gzip??

Plz help me, if anyone has idea about the same.

Thanks in advance..

Ashutosh

compressing .tiff files

Marcus's picture
Submitted by Marcus (not verified) on Sat, 01/03/2009 - 11:56.

To compress TIFF files, simply remove the following exlusion for images from the above example configuration:

mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*$

Also, add the .tif file extension in the file inclusions:

mod_gzip_item_include file \.(tif)$

Please let me know if you add this because I'd like to test a browser implementation against it. Thanks.

Marcus Adams
yEnc Decoder Proxy

Webcast
More Resources
How to Build an Optimal Hadoop Cluster to Store and Maintain Unlimited Amounts of Data Using Microservers

Realizing the promise of Apache® Hadoop® requires the effective deployment of compute, memory, storage and networking to achieve optimal results. With its flexibility and multitude of options, it is easy to over or under provision the server infrastructure, resulting in poor performance and high TCO. Join us for an in depth, technical discussion with industry experts from leading Hadoop and server companies who will provide insights into the key considerations for designing and deploying an optimal Hadoop cluster.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions