Gzip Cacher?

[Brett_Tabke]

I want a caching system for Apache (or compat) that will:

- Cache entire site
- Gzip those results
- Serve the Gzipped cached pages as appropriate

Is there such a beast? Or do I have to write one?

Why would I want it?
#1 Speed.
-- Eliminate all of your CMS overhead entirely.
-- You'd cut out Apache from having to Gzip the pages on the fly

I'd think you would cut your per-page over head by 50% and cut server load by 25%

#2 Code Modification
-- In the step before gzipping, you could do things like clean CMS identities from the code.
-- You could embed images into the source so that it would cut repetitive calls back to your server.

#3 Security:
-- You hide your CMS from public view by making it only reachable from the local host (the cacher) - thus, you'd be immune to alot of security issues. (there would be some url bit twiddling needed to make it work)

[robzilla]

The gzip compression overhead is pretty minimal these days, but you can serve pre-compressed files with mod_deflate. Not all clients/proxies support gzip, so you'll have to decide if you want to support those. If you do, you'll need to cache two versions of each file.

And if you're not going to forward uncached requests to the backend, of course you'll need to make sure your cache is always fully primed. Apache has a file cache [httpd.apache.org] but it looks pretty limited. Might want to consider putting something more specialized in front of Apache for this purpose. And to prime and manage your cache, it's probably best to write something tailored specifically to the site.

Full-page caches can be a pain to maintain, but if it suits the site, there's nothing faster. My holy grail.

A CDN might also work, but purging can be slow/problematic.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, I get all that. No software to do this off-the-shelf? I'm surprised.