Squeezing More Performance Out Of Your Web Server

Whether you’re running a virtual or dedicated web server, you want to squeeze as much juice as you can out of it. Apache’s HTTPD server has the possibility to use compression when it sends data to a web browser. The compression algorithms work particularly well on text data like HTML, CSS and Javascript but compressing image files for example would require too much resources.

To enable compression, add the following line in your web server’s configuration file (usually located in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf):

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

This way Apache’s HTTPD server will make use of the mod_deflate module to compress HTML, plain and XML files. When you’re done, simply restart the HTTPD service:

service httpd restart

Head over to Apache’s website for more information on mod_deflate:

• mod_deflate for Apache HTTPD Server 2.0
• mod_deflate for Apache HTTPD Server 2.2