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Geek Culture / Question for RichD

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Nicholas Thompson
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Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 2nd Nov 2005 17:55
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I recall you saying that one of the advantages of this new nifty server this wonderfull forum is sitting on was that it uses some kind of compression with the pages it uploads to you. What is the name of this mod as the server I'm in charge of doesn't seem to have this capability even though its a nice Athlon64 with RedHatES, etc, etc. Is it MOD_GZIP? If so - how easy is it to install? Does it put excess load on this servers CPU having to Zip stuff on the fly?

Cheers!
Nick

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Richard Davey
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2005 18:13
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I don't use mod gzip, although that WOULD have the same effect - but on everything (html, images, etc). PHP has a setting that enables content compression (using gzip) automatically, which is what I use. It only applies to PHP pages, but as that's 100% of the forum it works here. For an entire site I'd use mod_gzip instead.

For PHP you just modify a php.ini setting and restart the web server. For Apache if its a RedHat box you need to build and install the mod_gzip lib, and enable it in your Apache conf.

People don't quit playing because they grow old.
They grow old because they quit playing.
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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2005 18:38
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AH HA!!! Cheers rich!! That works an absolute dream! The site feels almost local now!

FYI: For people who dont know... change
zlib.output_compression = Off
to
zlib.output_compression = On

in php.ini

Cheers rich!! Here is an apply for you:

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Richard Davey
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2005 18:49
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Surely that was worthy of a beer?

People don't quit playing because they grow old.
They grow old because they quit playing.
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Peter H
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Posted: 2nd Nov 2005 19:59
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"We make the worst games in the universe."

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Jeku
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Posted: 2nd Nov 2005 20:16
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I'm not saying this will happen, but beware if you ever have dynamically created images with IE-only filters and have GZIP enabled on the server--- I have found that there's a small chance of white garbage pixels that are added to certain shades of black. I know it sounds bizarre, but it was a common thing that occured at my last place of employment, and they were pulling their hair out trying to resolve the issue.

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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2005 00:44
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I'm guessing thats more of an IE problem though and anyone who gets any problems while using IE deserves all they get for not chosing a better browser. IE really is the bain of my job. Its like everyone using plastic knives because they came with the food they ordered when there is a perfectly good metal one in the kitchen. Yeah the plastic one might work but inevitably it will break and annoy the hell out of you whereas the metal one will do a MUCH better job!

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Jeku
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2005 07:32
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Well when you step into a company after they've already written 10 million lines of IE dependant code, for some of the largest clients in the world, you don't go about changing it all to Firefox. It would take me 5 years.

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JoelJ
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2005 08:37
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Quote: "Well when you step into a company after they've already written 10 million lines of IE dependant code, for some of the largest clients in the world, you don't go about changing it all to Firefox. It would take me 5 years."

see, that's where the problem is with MS not using correct standards.
One day they're going to realize that they HAVE TO, and then switch, then all these sites will be crapo...


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Richard Davey
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2005 09:33
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It doesn't sound like a standards issue to me - more a genuine bug.

'Standards' don't specify "do not introduce random white pixels on gunzipped compressed images".

People don't quit playing because they grow old.
They grow old because they quit playing.
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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2005 11:03 Edited at: 3rd Nov 2005 11:30
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@Jeku - tell me about it! The site I work with was designed soley around IE before my time. The code is HORRIBLE. I swear that once it was made the person did a "find & replace" on all tabs and excess spaces at the begining on lines. He made it so there were tables within tables within tables within tables!!! It SO slow to render sometimes. I'm working on changing as much as I can into DIV's and using CSS to more effect. I tend to develop the site in Firefox as I've found that if it works in firefox - it generally works perfectly in everything else. I then apply any necessary tweaks to make it work in IE.

@Joel: That actually scares me. When MS do decide to obey some kind of standard then the whole web could easily collapse! I mean the little things like the way they have interpretted element sizes differently. Its meant to be Content + Padding + Border + Margin, which is how Gecko interprets it. IE, however, considers the border to be part of the padding (I think). This means if you give something a 1px border all around, it SHOULD be 2px wider and taller in every CORRECT browsers, but in IE it will be no different... Grrrrr


EDIT: Ok - just found out... It seems it did work - but not for me at work! Lol. The reason is sped up is because everyone went home and I had a 1Mb SDSL connection to myself (rather than 1/60th of a 1Mb SDSL connection). I then found out that one of the other sites that is hosted on the server that uses SSI HTML rather than PHP (not my decision) was having issues with a block that included a PHP from from a blog. The text was coming out as raw ZIP. I have had to disable the feature until I can get a chance to fully test the site zlib enabled :-(

PS: Rich, these forums dont use zlib for me either. Seems our proxy might be filtering out some headers and thus the servers dont know if I can do it or not so it just sends uncompressed content :-(

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