Technical Note: Things Are Zippier
Charles Johnson
Wed Feb 13, 2008 at 4:21 pm PST • Views: 216
After bogging down quite a bit today with a flood of traffic, I’m trying a new technique (new for LGF anyway) to cut the size of the files that have to be downloaded in order to display our pages, and improve the page loading speed for all our visitors. Last night we recompiled Apache with mod_gzip, and tonight I’ve enabled gzip compression on all files except images and stuff that’s already compressed, like PDF files and video.
(And yes, that recompiling of Apache is what caused our short downtime last night—the Cpanel virtual host manager went haywire and forgot the settings after the recompilation.)
This gzip compression means dramatic savings in file sizes. For example, the total size of our CSS and Javascript files before compression: 165,123 bytes. After compression: 41,364 bytes. That’s about one quarter of the size! The fewer bytes that have to be transferred for each page load, the faster things are for everyone.
Our PHP scripts were already being compressed through PHP’s zlib compression feature, so there’s no savings on those, but I disabled the PHP compression and let Apache do it instead, which should also take some of the strain off the PHP interpreter.
Frank says: