Http Gzip Compression in PHP

Posted in Blogging, Computers & Technology, How to Blog, Performance, SEO, Spread IE, Web 2.0 by Elliott Back on January 12th, 2006.

GZIP compression saves as much as 70% of the size on a text-heavy webpage. What does this mean for your users? Faster loading websites and less latency. What does this mean for your server? Less load and less bandwidth will be used if you judiciously compress and cache.

In PHP, there are two easy ways to do this. The first is to add the following to your .htaccess file and let Apache do the rest:

php_flag zlib.output_compression on
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 2

The second is to add the following to the top of your php script file:

ob_start(”ob_gzhandler”);

Either way, you can check the results of your page online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 10:54 pm and is tagged with output compression, compression level, gzip compression, script file, php script, htaccess, bandwidth, apache. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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Max 1 year ago 1 point
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Thanks! It worked just fine for me

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http://www.vitalsoundlab.com

Dustin 1 year ago 1 point
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"What does this mean for your users? Faster loading websites and less latency."

Just wanted to note that this really depends - while the file will obviously transfer faster, being much smaller in size and taking less bandwidth, often it will actually take longer for the page to load as the content must be decompressed after transfer. More info is available on php.net.

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http://www.dustinfineout.com

Andreas 8 months ago 1 point
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Thanks!

Damn this is good.

It reduced the page size from 9 k to 2 k.

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Svi Poslovi 5 months ago 1 point
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ob_start(”ob_gzhandler”);

This doesn't work for me.

And, Andreas, having in mind what Dustin wrote and the fact that, as well as decompression, compression also takes time, you should really compress everything. For instance, I have a 4 kB dynamic page. Sure I am not going to compress it. What's the purpose? It's not going to load faster...

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http://sviposlovi.com/

Svi Poslovi 5 months ago 1 point
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I don't see my previous comment but I suppose it will pop out eventually. Anyway, I have a minor addition to it. The first recommendation (with .htaccess) works for me, the second doesn't. I had to point this out because someone may think my VPS is incapable of doing any compression.

The point of avoiding .htaccess in my case is that I don't wish to compress everything. I want just one include in the PHP file I wish to compress and nothing in others...

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http://sviposlovi.com/

vishal 5 months ago 1 point
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@Dustin :

You probably have not been through details.

Unless you have computer of 1970s, decompressing wont take any time (i mean negligible). But bandwidth and network technology can't compete with the CPU power.

Conclusion:
Its always better to use gzip, unless you expect very old version browsers to be used.

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http://theypi.net

kareti 4 months ago 1 point
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i got 500 internal server error after applying the code.
dont know why!
any thoughts??

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http://cbtopsites.com