Are there any experiences with this Apache module?
(compression)
http://www.remotecommunications.com/apache/mod_gzip/

Thank you ....

I have it on my raq3... Works great... Any specific questions?

I'm thinking of installing this module on my RAQ4i, after the instructions i found in a thread earlier ....
But before installing I wanted to know, if there are any known "problems" on this matter ...

Thank you ....

i would also like to know how to install mod_gzip on my raq4

see this thread:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?&threadid=7555

HTH .....

I had problems with 'mod_gzip_can_negotiate' so I wouldn't enable that...

And it helps to set up a ramdisk and put the 'mod_gzip_temp_dir' on that (or just use 'in-memory' mode)...

I've installed mod_gzip on my raq4, but it has only been running for a few days. No problems so far. I do get an error when starting apache complaining about gzip using the old API, but that does not seem to cause any problems.

did the compression work?
How about the performance gain and the compression rates? Any measurements?

Thank you for your comments .....

I've installed the current mod_gzip at a RaQ4 the way I posted at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?&threadid=7555

It's running fine except it doesn't work for me with basic HTTP authentication (CAP_FILE_EMPTY, see http://lists.over.net/pipermail/mod_gzip/2001-April/001825.html ). Beside that, performance boosts up like hell if you're a 56k modem user and the page 's quite big.

For those with RaQ3 getting ap_regexec() error: upgrade your apache. See http://lists.over.net/pipermail/mod_gzip/2001-April/001815.html

huck,
maybe you want to install mgstats to check your compression.

http://wizard.ae.krakow.pl/~mike/mgstat/
http://wizard.ae.krakow.pl/~mike/mgstat_demo/

Monitoring mod_gzip
I installed the programs yesterday to check the stats of mod_gzip. Currently, the sites on the server with mod_gzip get few hits, so I do not have a good measure of success. Preliminary analysis shows that when files can be compressed, they are reduced by as much as 60-70%. Currently, I am only compressing html and text files, which accounts for about 20% of all requests.

I have another web site that gets over 200,000 hits per/month. We are getting ready to re-launch this site and move it to the server with mod_gzip. It will be ineteresting to see how much bandwidth compression saves. The real measure here would be total bandwidth and without mod_gzip. I have stats for this site over the past year, so within a month I should be able to get hard numbers on how much mod_gzip saves in bandwidth.

Image and other Compression
The problem (at least with my config) is that most of the bandwidth for a web site is not text/html files. We write very clean condense HTML and JavaScript, so our html files are pretty small to begin with. The real savings with mod_gzip would be with images. I am not a compression guru, but I would expect that either the time to compress and uncompress and/or possible loss of information would prevent images from being used with mod_gzip.

If anyone has used this with image files, I would like to hear how it worked out.

Client Side
Does anybody have any experience on the client side of gzipped documents. The browsers decompress on the fly, so I would assume with a fast machine the added time for decompression would be trivial compared to transfer time.

With my slowest connection as a 1.5Mbit DSL line, I can not really tell any difference if a file is 1K or 10K. ;)

The biggest savings would be on things like message boards people visit over and over... Images are cached but they're getting loads of new text/html content each pageview...

Netscape doesn't handle compressed images properly. You're better off using content negotiation and creating whatever.jpg.gz, etc...

Can somebody with a RaQ4 please verify if basic httpd authentication w/ htaccess is working or not? :confused:

I traced down the problem again, but I'm stuck that it's not working with password protected directories.


/etc/httpd/logs/error

[error] mod_gzip: EMPTY FILE [/tmp/_864_99_0.wrk] in sendfile2
[error] mod_gzip: Make sure all named directories exist and have the correct permissions.


mod_gzip log
"GET /protected/ HTTP/1.1" 401 - mod_gzip: CAP_FILE_EMPTY In:0 Out:0:0pct.


When trying to exclude everything which is within a protected directory by

mod_gzip_item_exclude reqheader "WWW-Authenticate:.*"
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader "WWW-Authenticate:.*"

the mod_gzip log show additionally
"HEAD / HTTP" 200 0 mod_gzip: DECLINED:HEAD_REQUEST In:0 Out:0:0pct.
after the CAP_FILE_EMPTY error.

I'm trying around on this problem some time now, and really would like to have the mod running.

Huck & Woofcat, can you check it at your machine please?

I get the same as you iplexx. Get a 401 not found page when trying to access .htaccess protected directories.

I tried to use an exclude directive to not compress .htaccess or .htpasswd but this did not help, which, must mean the error is comming before these files are accessed.

Most likely in the headers. I even tried to exclude WWW-Auth type headers with no success.

:confused:
I cannot believe this has not been found before. I doubt it is a raq only issue but it could be I suppose.

I havent check file perms on the .htaccess or .htpasswd files but I don't think those are the problem.

Originally posted by huck
If anyone has used this with image files, I would like to hear how it worked out.

Images on the web are already compressed (gif, jpeg and png), so compressing them again would be a waste of CPU power and slow down the server as it gets overloaded.