GZIP Enabled! Give your feedback
 

For all of those with HTTP 1.1 compliant browsers that support GZIP (most new ones do, i.e. IE6 and NS 4, 6, 7), you should see a noticeable difference in page download speeds. Especially for non-broadband users on a 56K modem. The forums now GZIP (compress) each page as a GZIP file and send it to you in compressed form. Your browser then unzip's and displays it.

For example, I tested one of the threads using a remote utility. Without GZIP it was 108K. After enabling the GZIP functionality in vBulletin on only level 1 it dropped in size to 18K. Not bad! :D

Let me know if you notice the difference everyone (especially from our modem users).

Can't say I've noticed a different but I'm using cable and I've never really had a problem with load time. But that feature sounds extreamly COOL! :D :D

§am.

I for sure noticed it.....feels like a 150hp shot.

Good job Dan...you get a cookie:)

making me hungry..its too late to be hungry...lol

i dunno what UF uses...its LAN, and im assuming a few T1s or a shared T3...so i dont notice, but that was definetly a good idea ;)....you do deserve that cookie....hehe:)

Cool... I've never really had load problems here.. this is one of the fastest loading sites I know of! :)

No Dan, you get TWO cookies, as it has very noticably increased the speed on my POS dialup machine.

thank you VERY much

I have a dial up connectiion at home and I can tell a big difference.

Thanks,

Made a huge difference! I'm not sure what size modem I have I think it's the 500k one or whatever. hehe Anyways thanks! It makes the site better to cruise around on.:)

I've been on dial up for the last 14 months or so. Will be changing to DSL soon - can't wait! ANyways, yes, there is a noticable difference. Much better and alot less of those stupid error pages that I've had to endure day after day after day...

Thanks Dan! :)
E

Well, the results are in! Turning GZIP support on within the forums dropped the bandwidth usuage on forums.mustangworks.com by 500 MEGS yesterday! YIKES! It's definitely a drastic difference, and it has made no negative impact on CPU load on the server. Therefore, I have removed ZLIB from PHP and instead installed the mod_gzip module on Apache. Therefore, ALL the pages on the entire site (dynamic/static/apps) are now being compressed with gzip too. Everyone should now see that the entire site is now faster to download. The only things that are not compressed are images, videos, style sheets, and javascript files. :)

Dan, i didnt see much of a difference. i am on cable. i think modem users will see most of the difference.

You are right. However, it does make a small difference on broadband too. And, for large pages it can make a noticable one. All the text is compressed, however, the images are not. JPG and GIF do not compress well. There would only be a small improvement, and actually, sometimes they come out larger compressed.