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Saturday, 27 February 2010 00:22

Mod_Deflate vs. Mod_Gzip

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I have gotten some good questions about my previous posting, The Benefits of Gzip. Some people have asked about the difference between gzip and deflate, which comes pre-installed on the newer versions of Apache Web Server.

The primary difference between the two, is as I mentioned, deflate comes pre-installed. That doesn’t mean that it’s already deployed. You will usually have to go in and manually deploy the component, but this is much easier than installing gzip.

The second difference is the amount of compression. Gzip will compress 4 – 6 % more than deflate. This means the page will load a little faster with Gzip than deflate.

So why use deflate? The third difference is the server power required to do the compression. Keep in mind that the compression is not being handled when you upload the code to your site, it’s happening when a visitor with Gzip in their browser hits your site. So each time, your Web server has to package up these files to send over. This is where deflate shines. Deflate requires a lot less energy to compress the files. Which means that on high traffic servers, deflate will load faster than Gzip. Confused?

Simply put, if you have a site that gets less than 1,000 unique visitors per day, and you really want the fastest page time available, go ahead and install mod_gzip. This will be extra work, but may be worth it for you. If your site gets over 1,000 unique visitors, still with mod_deflate. Your pages will load faster.

Read 1239 times Last modified on Sunday, 27 May 2012 12:58