Turning on Gzip with htaccess

Quick Question from a Crazy Newbie

[Livenomadic]

Warning: I know almost nothing about coding.

I have a site that serves static pages and PHP (a cms that doesnt have built in Gzip).

My hosting has PHP 4.3.8 with Zend Optimizer and Zlib.

I want to serve my files faster and I hear that Gzip is the best way to do it.

I heard that if I paste:

php_value zlib.output_compression On

into the htaccess file of mydomain.com then it will gzip all the files (php and html) and my site will be faster.

Questions:

1. Is this true? Just copy and paste? Will it be faster?

2. Will it gzip files on subdomains also?

3. Will it gzip files from a php cms that doesnt run gzip already?

[mipapage]

1. Yes, provided youare running PHP as an Apache Module.
2. Not too sure...
3. Yes.

If you don't get much of a response here, consider the PHP forum...