Professional LAMP: Linux®, Apache, MySQL®, and PHP5 Web Development

6.3. Content Compression

What if we were to tell you that with a couple minutes of Apache configuration, you could shave drastic amounts off your monthly bandwidth usage? You might think it's a lie, but in fact it's quite true—all you need is content compression and a couple of configuration directives.

What's content compression? When web pages are downloaded over the Internet, by default the bits and bytes that make up the page markup, images, stylesheets, and other content are in a mostly uncompressed state. The HTML that you write is sent directly as you saved it, whitespace and all. Content compression allows you to transparently compress the page markup and send it across the Internet to the user's browser, where it is silently uncompressed before it is rendered to the screen. Another way to think about it is in relation to sending zipped files via email. You could just as easily send a large document of multimedia file as a plain attachment to an email, but many times you compress the file into a zip or tar.gz archive before sending, to help shorten the time it takes to download the message and attachment.

Using content compression with Apache is very easy. All you need is mod_deflate, which comes with the Apache source code and is easily compiled in as a module when building Apache.

6.3.1. Using mod_deflate

As with the previously discussed modules, the first thing you need to do is check to see if the module is available either statically part of Apache, or as a module: ...