As a continuation of client side optimization let’s now find out how enabling gzip compression between server and client affects page loading.
First, one needs to enable mod_gzip for Apache (I’m using it) and configure it the proper way. Usually it’s reasonable to compress text content such as css or js files, as well as html response. Compressing images is usually considered as waste of CPU, so we should not allow it.
Here is my mod_gzip configuration file (thanks to this post):
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 300
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_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_send_vary On
#Files and items to compress
mod_gzip_item_include file \.html$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.htm$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.js$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.js
mod_gzip_item_include file \.faces
mod_gzip_item_include file \.css$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.jsp$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.jsp
mod_gzip_item_include uri \.jsp$
mod_gzip_item_include uri \.jsp
mod_gzip_item_include handler \.*
mod_gzip_item_include handler \.*$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/html$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/html
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/plain
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/plain$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/xml$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/css$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/javascript
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/javascript$
also this file has to be included in the apache configuration file by using the Include statement. To make a django application sending compressed response, the middleware list must contain django.middleware.gzip.GZipMiddleware in settings.py:
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
'django.middleware.gzip.GZipMiddleware',
'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
...
)After doing that a Firebug can be used to see that content is compressed by the response headers:
Now lets run TestWebPage against my key pages from the previous post:
Before gzip
http://gdestop.ru/anapa/view/492:
After gzip:
http://gdestop.ru/anapa/view/492:
So, we have very good results for the root page, and resort’s page. Hotel’s page did get such a good boost because when I moved all common scripts to CDN, they became compressed by CDN.