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I'm running a CentOS server and I want to save bandwidth, make pages faster, all that. How can I turn on http compression? Is it a module I enable for all sites? Can it be that simple?

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2 Answers

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Use mod_deflate.

Add this to your apache config:

LoadModule deflate_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_deflate.so
<Location />
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css
</Location>

Obviously if the path your system uses for apache modules differs then you'll need to use the correct path.

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For the CentOS 5 httpd rpm, mod_deflate is included and already loaded. You do need to use the DEFLATE output filter as bahamat describes above. – jsbillings Feb 3 '11 at 3:47
I added the LoadModule to a conf in conf.d and yeah, after restarting apache it's already loaded. How can I tell if it's serving everything compressed and why would google keep telling me to compress everything? Guess those are questions best asked elsewhere. – tooshel Feb 3 '11 at 17:08
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If you look at the headers (each browser has its own way, or use a sniffer such as wireshark or tcpflow to see them) one of them will be something like Content-Encoding:gzip. You should use an actual desktop browser (e.g., firefox, chrome, etc) rather than a lower level client (lynx, curl, telnet, etc) because the lower level clients may not support/request/advertise compression capability. – bahamat Feb 3 '11 at 17:56
I think the problem is I needed to add AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css to httpd.conf. Now it seems to be working. – tooshel Feb 4 '11 at 16:27
up vote 2 down vote

Check out http://gzipwtf.com/. Here you can see which files served are compressed while being served by the server.

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