Forum OpenACS Q&A: rl_returnz turned on at openacs.org

We turned on returning gzip encoded content at openacs.org.
Please let us know if you run into any problems displaying pages.

here, too.  i didn't realize oacs.org had such heavyweight pages.

FWIW, it seems a bit slower to us here at furfly HQ. This may be because we're on a T1, so for us the savings in transmission time may be smaller than the extra overhead of unzipping.  I'm using Mozilla and Mike is using Safari, both on Mac OS X.

I'm not suggesting you change it back, since it obviously helps most people, but anyone wanting to use this in an environment of fast connections might want to do some testing first.

I'm on a T3 and it's much faster here so I don't think it's a problem with being in a fast connection.

Maybe mozilla and safari on OS X don't deal as well with gzipping, or maybe it's just regular OS X speed 😊

-Roberto

Jeff ... is this suitable for sticking into the OpenACS 4 HEAD , with a parameter to turn it on or off?

Jeff: When I started using mod_gzip on Apache, I did a bit of digging, and from looking at your code I think you may need a few more exceptions. Basically you also want to turn of gzip for old Netscape browsers, and during the authentication process. Wether the internal operation of AOLserver does the latter automatically I don't know, but that is what is recommended by the mod_gzip gurus, as this breaks the authentication process for some (a few) obscure browsers versions out there.

The crucial lines from the mod_gzip.c section of a httpd.conf file are:

mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader WWW-Authenticate:.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude reqheader "User-Agent: Mozilla/4\.0[^ ]"

Frank.

Frank, two things, the first is that it really isn't my code. It was originally written by Jim Wilcoxson (for rubylane.com hence the rl) I just patched it to handle character encodings.

The second is, of the 100k hits in the openacs log only 55 actually trigger the old mozilla rule and of those I would say probably 25 or so are fake UA strings (typically robots probing for formmail.pl holes or other spidery things and if they advertise accepting gzip then thats their problem).

So for the 0.03% of browsers we might cause a problem for and given what those users web experience must be like already, I certainly am not going to go out of my way to fix it.

If you do want to fix it then I would say that you should probably match on "Mozilla/4.0[0-9]" since I also see things like Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;) and Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;) (spiders I would assume).

Jeff, our messages crossed.

You've got a point there re. not taking NS4.0* into account in the general case. Also the current mod_gzip docs do suggest a more strict regexp for matching the way you describe:

mod_gzip_item_exclude        reqheader  "User-agent: Mozilla/4.0[678]"

The reason why I am slightly concerned about this, is that I am working on a project, where the target audience statistically is a low income demographic. I know for a fact that many of the persons, who might be interested in what I am working on, still do use very old machinery on modem connections. Ie. Windows 95 is still in use out there with who knows what for a browser. So gzipped content would be especially valuable for the clients on modems in those cases where it works reliably.

Tom, can you post something here once you've uploaded your version?

Is that the version I should use, or should I use Jeff's version? I understand both are based on Jim's version, but does it matter which one I use?

I noticed that gzip-encoding has been turned off on openacs.org.  How come?
Was the gzip compression penalty not worth it?

Joel, the version we were running here for aolserver 3.x doesn't work for aolserver 4. I have updated it to do so but wanted to do some more testing before I switched openacs.org to using it.