Is mod deflate worth it?

[Amin Taheri]

Is mod deflate worth it?

Ive read that it increases server loads and is not good to have on a busy server, but that it decreases the page load times of sites (pages render faster to clients).

My Server does between 5 and 9 GB of bandwidth a day, with about 800 domains.

Does anyone use it on a busy (or comporable) server and can attest one way or the other from personal expierience?

Is there something better to use instead (cache, mod_expires, etc)?

 

[Amin Taheri]

wow, not one person has an opinion or comment on the matter?

 

[mediashaker]

works great

Sure it works great .. we run it on multiple servers (all running about 350 domains each).

Bandwidth has gone down a lot .. and the faster page load times are great.

Just add this to your httpd.conf (make sure that the load line for mod_deflate is uncommented.)

<Location />
  <IfModule mod_deflate.c>                 
    #compress content with type html, text, and css                 
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html                  
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
      #properly handle requests coming from behind proxies     
      Header append Vary User-Agent
    </IfModule>          
  </IfModule>               
</Location>

We turn on mod expires on a site by site bases (using .htaccess)..

In your .htaccess file:
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A300
ExpiresByType image/x-icon A2592000
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A3600
ExpiresByType text/css A3600
ExpiresByType image/gif A604800
ExpiresByType image/png A604800
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A604800
ExpiresByType text/plain A300
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash A604800
ExpiresByType video/x-flv A2592000
ExpiresByType application/pdf A300
ExpiresByType text/html A300
</IfModule>