Now testing - Mod Deflate

[Brett_Tabke]

A followup to:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Now that we are on Apache 2.0 - we are trying mod_deflate and so far it is appears good?

mucho better than mod_gzip...

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Yep, seems to be working for me (FF1/XP)...

However, I've found it all goes pear-shaped for my site(s) on strange corner cases like aborted pages, error pages, etc, etc.

I hope your experiment works...

Rgds

Damon

[AvaxHome]

We have a very high-loaded project and at some point we just realized that apache structure is just not what we need. We had to serve much static data (images and co) and apache with it's "new-process-for-each-connection" idea didn't perform well with 500.000 visits daily and more. We just switched to "nginx" - its very light, has the flexibility of apache, performs great with PHP4/5 and needs muuch less memory. Maybe it could be usefull if you don't get satisfied with Apache2

[Brett_Tabke]

Seems to be working good here. In the default config, we are saving about 30%. I am going to experiment with turning that up to the maximum.

[AvaxHome]

Would you post some stats later? You probably need such stats for the forum engine anyway. Something like:

1. backend {e.g. apache2/php5+PDO/MySQL}
2. hits
3. cpu load
4. mem load
5. ammount/type of ram/cpu/hdd

I'm very interested in high-load configurations, would appreciate the stats very much if those are not classified of course :)

[Brett_Tabke]

I did keep stats for awhile. It looks like about 35% overall bandwidth savings. Other than that, we didn't keep detailed logs of explicit detailed logs.

We are going to try cranking up the gzip compression level this week and see where it goes.

We are also going to play around with the buffer values. We work with some larger pages here and I think a 16k buffer (vs the default 8k) would get significantly better compression. I am concerned about the added memory usage though - especially during peak loads.

[Brett_Tabke]

cranked the buffer up to 32k with":

DeflateBufferSize 32384

And I could not detect a noticeable difference. The compression level appears to have went up about 10%.