On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:38 AM, Graham Leggett <minf...@sharp.fm> wrote: > On 01 Jun 2010, at 2:30 AM, Bryan McQuade wrote: > >> I had a conversation with a well known hosting provider recently and >> they told me they use the default Apache configuration for their >> shared hosting service. When I asked if they provide gzip as an option >> for their users, they said no, since it was not enabled by default. >> When I explained to them that enabling gzip has significant benefits >> for end users they were very interested in turning on gzip. This >> company just used the default Apache config, assuming that it was >> reasonably well tuned by default. You can claim that they're making >> bad, uninformed decisions, or whatever you want to, but the fact >> remains: some Apache users assume that the default config is a >> reasonably good config, and use it as-is. > > The very definition of "tuned" means "tailored for your local setup". > > The default httpd configuration works reasonably well out the box. It is > only when your site has special needs that it should start changing the > setup, and the site should understand what their needs are and whether it is > appropriate to turn it on. > > Zooming into mod_deflate, mod_deflate only makes sense if you have the CPU > to support it. If you don't have enough CPU support (think virtualised > hosts), mod_deflate will be a performance drag, not a boost. Typically, you > would want to front a mod_deflate with an HTTP cache, such as mod_cache (or > equivalent). Here mod_cache only makes sense if you have the disk space to > support it, and there is no real one-size-fits-all cache setup.
I agree that there are cases where the CPU costs are too great for mod_deflate, but I claim that this is a very small minority in 2010. Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail, Friendfeed) did a nice analysis of the cost/benefit tradeoffs of enabling gzip about a year ago. His finding was that enabling gzip is a significant cost saver for most servers: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/04/make-your-site-faster-and-cheaper-to.html > > The next problem is that you only want to enable mod_deflate on compressible > content - that means "not images" for most people, but might not be. Again, > not every site has the same content, and therefore not every site has the > same setup for mod_delate. > > This said, our default config is 15 years old, and attempts to disable > deflate for browsers that don't support it, like "Netscape 4". Unless there > are modern browsers that have broken protocol support for transfer encoding, > these obsolete examples need to be removed. > > Regards, > Graham > -- > >
