Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Webaccelerator with mod_gzip ?

Posted by michael on from the speed-kills dept.

Christian Bjerre writes: "Currently I'm using Squid as an webaccelerator to sit infront of apache and serve static files (.html .js .gif .png .jpg). Squid also serves my dynamic content which is .php files. My goal is to let Squid or another opensource program gzip the html, since I have Squid installed on another machine, where cputime is not an issue. I've been reading page up&down and Squid dosen't seem to support gzip encoding in Webaccelerator mode. I haven't tried feeding it gzipped html, which could be a solution, if there was a way of having Squid handle all content as binary. What do you guys & girls do to minimize bandwidth usage? // chris"

3 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. From Tanenbaum... by cperciva · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Network bandwidth is increasing much faster than computational power. As time tends towards infinity, trying to "save bandwidth" at the expense of more complicated processing is dumb.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  2. Use HTTP Properly by Fweeky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    HTTP is designed to be cached; for example, the Vary: header lets the cache know what to cache based on; in this case it'd be Content-Encoding.

    Squid may well be smart enough to know to cache documents with two different Content-Encoding's as different entities, but if not you just add Vary: Content-Encoding so it does.

    (that, at least, is the theory, I'm afraid I can't claim to have read the entire HTTP 1.1 spec, tsk :)

  3. Internet Explorer by Molina+the+Bofh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I run mod_gzip on my servers.

    I was using tcpflow to monitor the connections, and I noticed something strange. It seems most IE versions (like 5, for instance) append the following string on the request connection:

    Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

    that tells the server it can send compressed data.
    Strangely, I notice that if I access the very same site using IE 6 + patch Q312461 on XP, it DOES NOT send such string, thus all my requests return unencrypted.

    I checked, and I am not using a proxy, and on advanced options, Use HTTP 1.1 is checked allright.

    How can I enable compression ? It *SHOULD* be default. Has somebody else noticed this strange behavior ?

    --

    -
    Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice