Why use deflate instead of gzip for text files served by Apache?
The simple answer is don't.
RFC 2616 defines deflate as:
deflate The "zlib" format defined in RFC 1950 in combination with the "deflate" compression mechanism described in RFC 1951
The zlib format is defined in RFC 1950 as :
0 1
+---+---+
|CMF|FLG| (more-->)
+---+---+
0 1 2 3
+---+---+---+---+
| DICTID | (more-->)
+---+---+---+---+
+=====================+---+---+---+---+
|...compressed data...| ADLER32 |
+=====================+---+---+---+---+
So, a few headers and an ADLER32 checksum
RFC 2616 defines gzip as:
gzip An encoding format produced by the file compression program
"gzip" (GNU zip) as described in RFC 1952 [25]. This format is a
Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77) with a 32 bit CRC.
RFC 1952 defines the compressed data as:
The format presently uses the DEFLATE method of compression but can be easily extended to use other compression methods.
CRC-32 is slower than ADLER32
Compared to a cyclic redundancy check of the same length, it trades reliability for speed (preferring the latter).
So ... we have 2 compression mechanisms that use the same algorithm for compression, but a different algorithm for headers and checksum.
Now, the underlying TCP packets are already pretty reliable, so the issue here is not Adler 32 vs CRC-32 that GZIP uses.
Turns out many browsers over the years implemented an incorrect deflate algorithm. Instead of expecting the zlib header in RFC 1950 they simply expected the compressed payload. Similarly various web servers made the same mistake.
So, over the years browsers started implementing a fuzzy logic deflate implementation, they try for zlib header and adler checksum, if that fails they try for payload.
The result of having complex logic like that is that it is often broken. Verve Studio have a user contributed test section that show how bad the situation is.
For example: deflate works in Safari 4.0 but is broken in Safari 5.1, it also always has issues on IE.
So, best thing to do is avoid deflate altogether, the minor speed boost (due to adler 32) is not worth the risk of broken payloads.
It's possible that mod_deflate has been configured incorrectly.
A typical mod_deflate configuration may be excluding certain browsers based on user-agent strings, and may only be configured to compress certain file types - identified by their MIME type as registered on the server.
You should be compressing all of your HTML, CSS and Javascript files, but not your PNG, GIF or JPEG files, and there are bugs with Netscape 4 you may or may not want to account for. Try using the sample code from the documentation:
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>
Note too that the GIDZipTest GZIP test you posted does not test associated Javascript and CSS files, whereas YSlow does - in GIDZipTest GZIP test you'd need to test these individually.
I guess it is also possible that your ISP is using a caching proxy - transparent or not - which is mangling or removing your Accept-Encoding: header. To rule this out as the cause you could get someone to test it from outside of your ISP.
Another thing to note is that when compressing files using gzip you are trading bandwidth for CPU time. Above the lower compression strengths you will see diminishing returns in bandwidth savings, but huge increases in CPU time required. Unfortunately with a compression strength as high as 9, you are almost certainly wasting too much CPU time for very little improved compression - I would always recommend using strength of 1.
Best Answer
Did you remember to clear your cache before reloading the page and running Yslow?
I had the exact same problem and fixed it like that. This is my code: