Using Apache’s mod_deflate module, I’ve significantly lowered page size and load times on a few Fusion Bay projects and my personal website. Some load times have more than doubled in speed, from an intense loading time of 4-5 seconds to a measly 1 second.

The crazy thing about the pages that used to take a while to load was I always assumed it was the computer slowing things down due to a large amount of text to be rendered, not the size. I simply never paid attention! How silly.

I understand there are some issues with HTTP compression and older browsers that don’t support it properly, however I think this is a very unlikely scenario for 99.9% of our viewer-ship.

For more information on mod_deflate you can check out the Apache Documentation.

I personally used the simplest configuration possible, opting to do the following:

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    SetOutputFilter Deflate