PHP Compression On Your Website... 90% faster loading

Found out some interesting information this week about making your web site load faster. All you need is PHP enabled on your server (ask your webhost).

It's so easy too... just add the following line as the FIRST line of every php file:
(Left-Arrow)? ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?(RightArrow)

Replace the (RightArrow) and (LeftArrow) with >
and <

It enabled gzip compression (which browsers have supported for years). It cut one of my pages from 133K to 6.6K... just fricking rediculous.

See
<table id="table_results" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1"> <tbody><tr style="cursor: pointer;" onmouseover="setPointer(this, 4, 'over', '#D5D5D5', '#CCFFCC', '#FFCC99');" onmouseout="setPointer(this, 4, 'out', '#D5D5D5', '#CCFFCC', '#FFCC99');" onmousedown="setPointer(this, 4, 'click', '#D5D5D5', '#CCFFCC', '#FFCC99');"><td onmousedown="setCheckboxColumn('id_rows_to_delete4 ');" bgcolor="#ffcc99" valign="top">http://www.whatsmyip.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=43</td></tr></tbody> </table>
for more info (sorry about the formatting... it was copy/paste)

Interesting tip. However, I tried it out on this site, simply with a few of the most accessed modules, and discovered that it loaded my server nearly 5 times more then what is normal. This message board software already incorporates a compression algorithm, so perhaps there was simply a case of diminishing returns at work.

Usually there is a tradeoff involved in algorithms like this. Compression routines are rather processor intensive so you are trading processor loading for network speed gained from smaller files. You may have to determine what is best for you based on you own situation. A heavy duty processor on a slow network may very well benefit greatly from something like this. But a weak processor may just be brought to its knees if your traffic levels are fairly high.

Good point webslave.

I'm got my site hosted externally so I don't get access to CPU performance (Although I hope to have my own server after we move when I get a static IP address). This site also gets a lot moer traffic than mine ever does (I get about 400 hits visits a day... this site gets about 35,000 according to your topsites list). I would think that the double compression could be bad as well, which may be why it's having problems on your server (like running WinZIP in 'Best Compression' mode takes longer than 'Normal')

So I think it would be better on lower-traffic sites (most the reptile breeders), but would be bad for shared hosting or large sites such as this.