mod_gzip is your friend

Ian — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:15:00 +0000

To save bandwidth on one off the servers I look after I decided to implement mod_gzip.

The server in questions is running RedHat ES3, apache 1.3.37, Coldfusion 7.0.2 and has the cPanel/WHM control panel.

First off was to get mod_gzip compiled, now this can be done manually, download a pre compiled one or in my case just go into WHM and rebuild apache with the mod_gzip box checked. The version it puts in is 1.3.26.1a.

As I’d already got Coldfusion running on this webserver the resulting httpd.conf file it creates became invalid so I had to move a few things about. To cut to the chase the order in which modules load is crucial with Coldfusion due to the was the mod_gzip and mod_jrun modules work intercepting requests. The following is my httpd.conf (abbriviated) with the relevant sections.

LoadModule ... --snip-- LoadModule jrun_module /usr/local/coldfusionmx7/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1/mod_jrun.so JRunConfig Verbose false JRunConfig Apialloc false JRunConfig Ssl false JRunConfig Ignoresuffixmap false JRunConfig Serverstore /usr/local/coldfusionmx7/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1/jrunserver.store JRunConfig Bootstrap 127.0.0.1:51011 #JRunConfig Errorurl #JRunConfig ProxyRetryInterval 600 #JRunConfig ConnectTimeout 15 #JRunConfig RecvTimeout 300 #JRunConfig SendTimeout 15 AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm .cfml .cfc .cfr .cfswf LoadModule gzip_module libexec/mod_gzip.so mod_gzip_on Yes mod_gzip_can_negotiate Yes mod_gzip_static_suffix .gz AddEncoding gzip .gz mod_gzip_update_static No mod_gzip_command_version '/mod_gzip_status' mod_gzip_temp_dir /tmp mod_gzip_keep_workfiles No mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 500 mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 500000 mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 60000 mod_gzip_min_http 1000 mod_gzip_handle_methods GET POST mod_gzip_item_exclude file .js$ mod_gzip_item_exclude file .css$ mod_gzip_item_exclude file .swf$ mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/ mod_gzip_item_include file .php$ mod_gzip_item_include file .cfm$ mod_gzip_item_include file .jsp$ mod_gzip_item_exclude file .pdf$ mod_gzip_item_include file .fic$ mod_gzip_item_include file .html$ mod_gzip_item_include file .htm$ mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/html mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/plain mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/xml #mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/force_download$ #mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/pdf$ mod_gzip_item_include handler type-coldfusion mod_gzip_item_include handler jrun-handler mod_gzip_dechunk Yes #then the logging directives LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%V %r" % d_gzip_input_size}n -< Out:%{mod_gzip_output_size}n = %{mod_gzip_compression_rat io}n pct." common_with_mod_gzip_info2 CustomLog "logs/mod_gzip.log" common_with_mod_gzip_info2 mod_gzip_add_header_count Yes mod_gzip_send_vary On AddType type-coldfusion .fic --snip-- ClearModuleList AddModule ... --snip-- AddModule mod_jrun.c AddModule mod_gzip.c

In my test case I had a page show as 18224 bytes originally which compressed down to 3956 bytes a saving of 14268 bytes or 79%! To test the compression I was using the port80software.com compression check. You can also see this site’s report.

More Information (stuff I read):

owensperformance.com – cheers Irvin!

mod_gzip on sourceforge

How to install mod_gzip

Ian Winter » compression

mod_gzip is your friend