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Re: large web pages
On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 02:00:48PM -0400, Phil Edwards wrote:
> I have no clue either, but I will mention that a certain directory tree
> on the webserver is gzip'd nightly. If the browser indicates that it can
> handle gzip'd files, that's what the server sends. The original copy is
> also kept, for the sake of less capable browsers.
We did this with a nonstandard apache module with 1.x; I'm pretty
sure the functionality was lost in the Apache 2 upgrade. There is
a way to do the comparable thing at run-time with Apache 2, but it
takes some configuration changes. I had the necessary changes figured
out a while back but I don't remember them right now.
I liked the static .gz files because so little of our content is
dynamic -- no reason to compute that stuff on the fly.
All the mainstream browsers can handle inline gzipped content these
days, BTW. The trick to seeing the difference is to either watch
the Apache log. Or most browsers have a progress bar that shows
the amount of data transferred so far -- if you're downloading a
big doc page or one of the completed mailing list web archive dirs
(all the indexes are compressed), you can see the number of bytes
being transferred. It's pretty obvious; if you bring up
gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-06/ you'll download over two hundred kb --
gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-05/ is only 53kb if the .gz file is sent.
Anyway, one of these days one of us will get around to re-enabling
this stuff.
J