mod_gzip

[alexswalker]

My web host informed me that mod_gzip was installed on my shared server and it is in use on my web host's forum. However when I use the utility at leknor.com/code/gziped.php to check whether my pages are being compressed it says they are not!

What do I need to do? I contacted my webhost and he said:

"This would be a programming issue and not server side. Maybe a search on Google will bring up some examples."

A search on google was useless, bringing up 404 errors all over the place.

Can anyone help?

Alex

[jdMorgan]

Alex,

Try a search for "mod_gzip apache", and/or see http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-gzip/

Jim

[alexswalker]

Jim,

What am I looking for? - what am I doing wrong? It is meant to be installed on the server!

Alex

[jdMorgan]

Unless someone posts who's actually done this, you'll need to do the research yourself. Here's some more info from one of the authors - see the menu on the left side of the page: [schroepl.net...]

I actually played with sending several pre-compressed files last night, but it did not work perfectly across all filetypes - I didn't have all the content-type and content-encoding headers set up quite right. I'm not even sure if my servers have mod-gzip installed -- I was just playing with downloading files I had already gzipped (on my PC) from my server. Maybe I'll learn some more over the few weeks.

Jim

[robho]

When mod_gzip is set up on the server, you don't need to do anything from a user (webmaster) programming point of view, other that make sure the extensions you are using for for your file names match the extensions gzip has been set up to compress.

The apache config includes various lines like

mod_gzip_item_include file \.html$

.

It's normal to compress html files, and the output of perl scripts (.pl), but usually images and stylesheets are not compressed.

In addition, .php files are not normally compressed with mod_gzip as php has (optional) compression built in.

So, ask the webhost specifically which extensions/file types are compressed, maybe they are only doing .html files and are yours are .htm, etc. Or maybe the webhost has simply failed to configure it right - ask for an example of a page elsewhere on the server that has the same extension as the host claims is compressed, if possible...