comparison of webmasterworld server header with others

[sandyk20]

I ran a comparison of webmasterworld server header against ours this are the results:

Server Response: [webmasterworld.com...]
Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 09:47:05 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
X-Powered-By: BestBBS v3.39
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Server Response: [mydomain.com...]
Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 09:46:17 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.4.0 mod_ssl/2.8.21 OpenSSL/0.9.7a
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.0
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

I need to know should we make some changes to our server? and will be helpful if someone can provide more information on this:
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

We are running a linux semi-dedicated environment (vps), and the entire server is couple of active PHP+Mysql based websites with a minimum of 500+ users and guests online on a 10 minutes cookie timeout.

[lammert]

The ultimate source for HTTP headers is the World Wide Web Consortium. A thorough explanation of each header can be found at [w3.org...]

If you have a cookie lifetime of only 10 minutes, I expect that you do not want your content cached indefinitely. Setting exipration headers might help to prevent this.

The character definition ISO-8859-1 helps if your site has an international audience. Of course you have to use the character set value that actually matches your site.

The vary header is added because WebmasterWorld uses compression.

KeepAlive On or Off (the reason for Connection: close) depends on the number of elements you serve per webpage. If you only serve one page without graphics like WebmasterWorld it is good to switch the feature of because it keeps Apache connections busy waiting for a request which never arrives. If you are serving many graphics, leave it on because visitors will see a higher download speed.