How to save bandwidth using mod_deflate

The Apache2 module mod_deflate enables support for HTTP compression. This can save you bandwidth and will generally speed up access to your site a little. It can even save resources on the server in some circumstances, as although more CPU is used per-request, over-all there are may be slightly fewer concurrent connections at any one time.

It's quick and simple to enable mod_deflate it the Debian way:

a2enmod deflate

/etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate.conf

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
        BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

        DeflateFilterNote Input input_info
        DeflateFilterNote Output output_info
        DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio_info
        LogFormat '"%r" %{output_info}n/%{input_info}n (%{ratio_info}n%%)' deflate
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/deflate_log deflate

</IfModule>

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

There's a web-based tool to check your server for HTTP compression support here:

http://www.microsoft.com/search/Tools/default.aspx