I recently discovered [mod_deflate], which compresses webserver content before sending it out – if you’re not using it you should really check it out. I turned it on and it worked flawlessly for me, with two exceptions.

  1. Server-side includes
    These just did not play well together out of the box…
  2. PHP and Perl “streaming” output
    I have some scripts, most notably imagescraper, that need to stream the html in the results page as it is computed, not all at once AFTER it is built, as mod_deflate requires.

Turning off [mod_deflate] is trivial. I used the no-gzip environment variable as follows:

# MDM This is to disable [mod_deflate] for imagescraper, so we don't try to compress the streaming results...

    SetEnv no-gzip 1


# MDM Drop this into a virtual host block to TURN OFF [mod_deflate], so it doesn't break SSI.
SetEnv no-gzip 1

I turned on mod_deflate, but I clobbered SSI, breaking boxcarkid.com.

Config files that still need tweaking:

/home/m/config/apache2/machine_globals.conf
/home/m/config/apache2/virtualhosts/boxcarkid.conf

Also upgraded my StartCom certificate, pretty easy! Thanks guys!