Speed up your apache server with mod

Speed up your apache server with mod_deflate

Sunday, 25 February 2007 22:15

Since I am facing performance problem due to the load of visitors and a badly configured server, I decide today to document my findings in this new series of articles.

The mod_deflate module provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.

Server: Strato (www.strato.de)
Operating system: SuSE / openSuSE
Requirements: root access and basic Unix knowledge

Why installing mod_deflate? is PHP gzip not enough?
PHP Gzip only compress PHP output, not unical file, like CSS, Javascipt, fixed HTML, other ressources.

1	Use yast2 to install mod_deflate on the system, this will create files (*.so) in /usr/lib/apache2-worker/ and /usr/lib/apache2-prefork/
2	Edit the file # vi /etc/sysconfig/apache2 and add deflate and headers (optional A) APACHE_MODULES="deflate headers access actions alias auth auth_dbm autoindex cgi dir env expires include log_config mime negotiation setenvif ssl userdir php4 php5 perl rewrite suexec"
3	create a new file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/mod_deflate.conf #vi /etc/apache2/conf.d/mod_deflate.conf and add these lines, at the end of file, adapt all path according to your system. <IfModule mod_deflate.c> # place filter 'DEFLATE' on all outgoing content #SetOutputFilter DEFLATE AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml # exclude uncompressible content via file type SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif\|jpeg\|jpg\|png\|rar\|zip)$ no-gzip dont-vary SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:mpg\|avi\|mpeg\|wmv\|mp3\|wma\|ogg)$ no-gzip dont-vary <IfModule mod_headers.c> # A properly handle requests coming from behind proxies Header append Vary User-Agent </IfModule> # deflate.log, log compression ratio on each request DeflateFilterNote Input instream DeflateFilterNote Output outstream DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)' deflate CustomLog /var/log/apache2/deflate.log deflate # Properly handle old browsers that do not support compression BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html </IfModule>
4	start # apache2-reconfigure-mpm this recreate the file /etc/apache2/sysconfig.d/loadmodule.conf and restart apache automatically.
5	verification: View HTTP Request and Response Header with http://web-sniffer.net/ search for Content-Encoding: gzip