I have a "download page" that serves various types of content (PDFs, ZIP files, images, etc.) via a PHP script that is executed atop Apache.
Whenever I enable GZIP compression on this page, via mod_deflate, Web browsers do not show the total file size to be downloaded, presumably because Apache is chunking the reply and the Content-Length header is very small, e.g., 20 (even when the binary file size is several MB). I came to this conclusion after finding these two related threads: http://serverfault.com/questions/183843/content-length-not-sent-when-gzip-compression-enabled-in-apache http://serverfault.com/questions/366996/how-can-the-apache-2-2-deflate-module-length-limit-be-increased I'm able to reproduce the issue at will, and enabling mod_deflate definitely causes the Content-Length header value to change to a low value (and Web browser download progress to "break"). Perhaps this is "expected behavior". If that is the case, then I'm wondering how to address the behavior; users can't live without a progress bar for files this large (and I don't blame them). Is it advisable to set the DeflateBufferSize directive to some ridiculously large value? That just... "feels wrong". Some of the file-downloads are 2GB in size, and I hesitate to set DeflateBufferSize to 2097152000. Would it be better to disable GZIP compression for all URLs within the /download/ (for example) directory? Or perhaps for certain file-types? Because I tried that with the following, but it seems not to have any effect (I believe this example to be directly from the Apache documentation, with a few additional extensions added): <Location /> SetOutputFilter DEFLATE # Don't compress images (or other files that are already compressed) SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \ \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|zip|7z|rar|sit?x|mp3|flac|ogg|pdf)$ no-gzip dont-vary # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary </Location> The URLs in question take the following format: https://localhost/public/download/My%20Installer.zip Also, I am setting the Content-Type header appropriately, e.g., to "application/zip", given the above URL. So, I'm not sure why that rule don't seem to be effective. I would be happy to hear anybody's thoughts or suggestions. Thank you for taking the time, -Ben --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@httpd.apache.org
