How to check if Apache compression is working

apache-2.2compressionconfiguration

I just added the following to my Apache config file:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

How do I check if it is actually working? Nothing on the browser tells me if the page contains gzipped content.

Best Answer

An alternative way to quickly check the headers of the HTTP response would be to use curl.

For instance, if the Content-Encoding header is present in the response, then mod_deflate works:

$ curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' http://www.example.org/index.php
[...]
Content-Encoding: gzip
[...]

If you run the above command without the -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' part, which implies that your HTTP client does not support reading compressed content, then Content-Encoding header will not be present in the response.

Hope this helps.

Related Solutions

Tomcat – Apache2 – mod_expire and mod_rewrite not working in httpd.conf – serving content from tomcat

Probably the ProxyPass / directive you have in your config routes all requests to the Tomcat backend, bypassing all your mod_rewrite directives. You can try to remove the ProxyPass directive and use RewriteRule with the [P] flag after your other rewrites:

mod_rewrite: P|proxy

For the expire headers the situation is worse — in another similar question a solution was not found.

Option +FollowSymLinks would be needed for using mod_rewrite in .htaccess files; in your case it is not required, because you can put everything in the Apache config. Moving rules from config to .htaccess is pointless and can only make things slower. However, there is an important difference between .htaccess and the Apache config — in .htaccess patterns in RewriteRule are matched against relative filesystem paths (which never start with /), while in the VirtualHost context these patterns are matched against the URL path after the hostname, which always starts with /. Therefore at least one of your rules is incorrect:

RewriteRule ^content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

should be

RewriteRule ^/content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

(note the additional slash in the beginning).

Gzip pre-compression

You could write a simple bash script:

#!/bin/bash
for file in *.css *.js; do
  gzip -c $file > $file.gz;
done

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tomcat – Apache2 – mod_expire and mod_rewrite not working in httpd.conf – serving content from tomcat

Gzip pre-compression

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