On 8/23/06, Chris Price <cprice@xxxxxx> wrote:
Hey all;
I have some questions about mod_deflate;
Specifically, in my 8 years of using apache, I had never heard of it
until a few weeks ago. Google shows plenty of howto implement and man
page sites, but few 'mod_deflate is soo good it saved my marriage' type
of testimonials. Given the significant savings in bandwidth that *seem*
to go with mod_deflate I am wondering why I have never heard of it - it
seems too good to be true.
Would someone please be so kind as to post a broef summary of strengths
and weaknesses of mod_deflate? Browser incompatibility, issues with
nat/proxies, etc... My spidey sense is telling me that something isnt
quite right here...
Plenty of people use mod_deflate (and the older mod_gzip), so there isn't any big catch. It does indeed significantly reduce bandwidth usage and sometimes latency. There are some disadvantages: - Browser incompatibilities. The mod_deflate docs give instructions on how to work-around the most common ones. - Increased processor usage. But many webservers are not processor constrained. - Pages become less cacheable since you need to vary on at least accept-encoding, and frequently user-agent as well. - You can't use zero-copy techniques (liek the sendfile syscall ) to send files, which increases the load on the server. - For many sites, the majority of content is already-compressed stuff like images, which won't be helped by mod_deflate. Joshua. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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