mod_deflate

by dev on Mar.08, 2009, under IT

One of the ways to optimize the loading speed of a website is to drastically reduce the size of all files sent to our clients and using gzip compression is the first solution that comes to my mind. Using mod_deflate in Apache2 is supported on most modern browsers, gives you statistics, filtering options based on MIME-type or even filename, caches the compressed files and is so easy to configure you’ll be drinking your coffee with a huge smile of satisfaction in less then 5 minutes.

First of all enable mod_deflate:
$ a2enmod deflate

Then edit /etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate.conf for a server wide configuration. For per-site configuration you can place these lines in your virtual hosts usually stored in apache2/sites-available.
<IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html DeflateCompressionLevel 9 SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 #If you want to enable logging uncomment the lines bellow #DeflateFilterNote Input input_info #DeflateFilterNote Output output_info #DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio_info #LogFormat '"%r" %{output_info}n/%{input_info}n (%{ratio_info}n%%)' deflate #CustomLog /var/log/apache2/deflate_log deflate </IfModule>