Comments on: Improving Apache Web Server Performance

By: Mary

Mary — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:58:29 +0000

Dustin – thank you for your very useful info and quick reply. And Nick – thanks again for your article.

By: Dustin Olson

Dustin Olson — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:19:19 +0000

You can use the BrowserMatch directive in the Apache configuration file to specify which browsers will and will not receive compressed versions of the site. This way you can turn off the deflate filter for those older browsers. If you are wanting to utilize this functionality, I would recommend looking through both the Sample Configurations and the Enabling Compression sections at the following site:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html#recommended

To get a better idea of which browsers can and cannot handle compression, the following page may also be of some use:
http://schroepl.net/projekte/mod_gzip/browser.htm

By: Mary

Mary — Fri, 20 May 2011 18:19:32 +0000

I just came across this article yesterday and I’m not sure whether or not you might still be responding to comments. My website is on WestHost 3.0. What you have above for adding to your httpd.conf file looks like a very nice, simple and elegant solution for webpages compression. But how do you take care of the problem of older browsers that can’t handle zipped webpages?

By: Nick Venturella

Nick Venturella — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:25:41 +0000

WestHost 4.0 clients with cPanel (hosting accounts created after November 2009) can enable gzip compression right from within the cPanel Control Panel!

Simply login to your cPanel Control Panel, then click on “Optimize Website” (under the “Software / Services” section). Choose the option to “Compress the specified MIME types”. Erase what is currently in the text box and enter the following list of MIME types instead, as one long line:

text/html text/css text/xml text/plain text/rtf text/javascript application/x-javascript application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml application/rdf+xml application/postscript application/msword application/vnd.ms-excel application/vnd.ms-powerpoint image/svg+xml

After making this change, click on the “Update Settings” button.

By: Fiona

Fiona — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:50:55 +0000

Thanks a lot for the gzip compression code. It works!

By: Altax

Altax — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:26:24 +0000

Hey very useful piece of information. I’m going to try this stuff. Thanks for the post.

By: Susan

Susan — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:05:54 +0000

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Susan

By: Nick Venturella

Nick Venturella — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:26:51 +0000

Yes, Jeff, clicking “Restart Account” will restart Apache and it will make all changes in httpd.conf effective immediately.

The “Restart Account” from within Site Manager is similar running the “restart” command in SSH — it will stop all of the services running within your account (e.g., Apache, MySQL) and then restart them. Any other the three methods (clicking on “Restart Account” in Site Manager to restart all services, running the “restart” command in SSH to restart all services, or running the “apachectl restart” command in SSH to restart just the web server) will restart the Apache web server and make changes to httpd.conf take effect. There is no waiting period — the changes are effective as soon as the Apache web server starts up again.

On the note of .htaccess files: The directives to control persistent connections must appear within the httpd.conf file, so you can’t put these in an .htaccess file. The directives to enable mod_deflate (SetInputFilter and AddOutputFilterByType), however, can be used in an .htaccess file instead if you prefer to only compress a certain directory, although I’m not sure why you’d want to do this.

By: Jeff C

Jeff C — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:46:00 +0000

Nick, I was referring to the restart account feature under the domain/manager control panel. However, after editing the .htaccess file I can no longer access the control panel. I was wondering how I can restart the apache server and was not sure if restarting the “account” was one in the same?

By: Steve D

Steve D — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:58:36 +0000

It is not WestHost’s responsibility to perform this as each site is unique. It’s cool the subject was brought to our attention. Thanks.