SitePointForums.com saves 40% Bandwidth with vB2.0

[Wayne Luke]

At the beginning of the month we finally got PHP compiled correctly to enable gZip compression.

So far this month, our average daily bandwidth is down by over 40% from February and April of this year.

This is along with added traffic and higher page views. Our forum home page went from over 65K to less than 10K for the end user. This means the page is downloaded faster. The additional rendering time is almost unnoticeable in Internet Explorer and Mozilla .9. People using the Opera browser have also noticed a significant speed increase in the forums.

If you are contemplating turning on gzip compression on your forum site, just remember it will save you money.

[Joshs]

All I have to do to enable Gzip, is select yes in the options? I dont have to add anything?

[Wayne Luke]

Originally posted by Joshs
All I have to do to enable Gzip, is select yes in the options? I dont have to add anything?

You have to have the zlib compression library compiled into your copy of PHP.

[Joshs]

Where do I get that, and how do I do that! LoL :)

[Wayne Luke]

There are instructions on the PHP homepage. http://php.net

[Joshs]

I cant find it, is there any chance you have a link?

[Chris Schreiber]

Step-by-step instructions:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17643

[eva2000]

yup and for dedicated server owners installing mod_gzip further reduces bandwidth on html/cgi etc pages

- http://www.i4net.tv/marticle/get.php?action=getarticle&articleid=12

[Joshs]

Will all of this work on a Windows 2000 server? I just see linux mentioned...

[Philipp]

Joshs:
IIS 5.0 support allready HTTP compression

http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/iis/httpcomp.asp

[odell]

Would <? phpinfo(); ?> tell me if it was compiled into php on my server ?

If so what am I looking for ?

[JamesUS]

odell - Yes, have a look through the page for "zlib"

Philipp - That is different to gzip compression :)

[Chris Schreiber]

Originally posted by odell
Would <? phpinfo(); ?> tell me if it was compiled into php on my server ?

If so what am I looking for ?

Yes look for the following:

[Chris Schreiber]

And this:

[Philipp]

That is different to gzip compression
From the website:
Using HTTP Compression reduces the network bandwidth that is used to transfer each file from the server to the client. Additionally, it helps to reduce the download time and improve performance for end-users. HTTP Compression uses the industry standard GZIP and Deflate algorithms, which are built into Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer versions 4 and above. Both compression and de-compression algorithms compress and cache static files, and optionally perform on-demand compression of dynamically generated responses before sending them over the network. These same algorithms are again used to de-compress the static files and dynamic responses on an HTTP 1.1 supported client. For more information on the HTTP 1.1 protocol and the GZIP and Deflate algorithms, see Related Resources later in this document.
:)

[cybrcyfr]

Since we installed vB, it seems we are pushing over a gigabyte of transfers per day.

I have the option set to not add "no-chache" headers in the vB CP, but in the template "forumhome" I see the following lines:


<!-- no cache headers -->
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="-1">
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache">
<!-- end no cache headers -->


Are those always supposed to be there? We are having our hosting company recompile PHP with the zLib libraries, but is there anything else we can do to reduce bandwidth? This is costing us a small fortune :)

www.klient.com

[Wayne Luke]

Those are there for security purposes. However not all browsers or proxy servers read them so their importance is of minimal use.

[claypots]

Is there a reason I received this topic in my email - as an email notification?

[cybrcyfr]

Originally posted by cybrcyfr But is there anything else we can do to reduce bandwidth? This is costing us a small fortune :)

www.klient.com [/B]

Is there anything else we can do? We know the majority of our traffic is comming from the forums directory. I have done everything I can to reduce the image sizes...

I have also disabled avatars and all uploads. I ahve also disabled displaying the option to display the template name in the source code.

[AbuliaDon]

Can you turn this feature on in conjunction with PHPAccel? I was under the impression that is was a "one-or-the-other" sort arrangement. I have mod_gzip installed and compiled with PHP 4.2.2. I currently have gzip turned OFF in vBulletin for this (assumed) reason.

Clarification please?