I am planning to use php gzip to compress my pages as I understand it’s very powerful in compressing CSS and JS, the question is this.
Isn’t there a delay for PHP to compress the page then send it over, because it gzips it during rendering as I understand if I use ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”);
So is there a delay and how does it affect the server CPU usage?
I don’t know the real stats on this - but unless you are getting thousands and thousands of visitors it really shouldn’t matter. I use mod_deflate for css / javascript & php pages, and i works fine for me.
Read more: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html
thanks, but it seems to me that it slows me down if I do it for my html page, because html is rendered with PHP and it waits till the data is all outputed by the Database before showing so I see a noticable delay,
I think it’s not as big of an issue for GZIPING JavaScript and CSS files, because once downloaded it will be cached by the browser, but for me it seems it’s better to somehow cache it in Gziped format in the server so that it doesn’t have to process it everytime…
The hard part is how do you keep track of the changes to the file… for example if I update the JS or CSS file, how does it know it’s updated to change the cache… hmmm