Speed Up and Save Your Website Bandwidth with GZip Compression

Why GZip compression can speed up your website?
With GZip compression enable it will compress data being sent out from your Web server, and have the browser decompress this data on the fly, thus reducing the amount of data sent and increasing the page display speed.

Why Compress HTML?
HTML is used in most Web pages, and forms the framework where the rest of the page appears (images, objects, etc). Unlike images (GIF, JPEG, PNG) which are already compressed, HTML is just ASCII text, which is highly compressible.

How can i enable gzip compression?
You can install the apache mod_gzip module if you are familiar with server. Or, you can use PHP ob_gzhandler() function to achieve the same output.

The code below is getting from PHPBB forum:-

Save this file as “gzip_header.php”

< ?php
$phpver = phpversion();
$useragent = (isset($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]) ) ? $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] : $HTTP_USER_AGENT;

if ( $phpver >= ‘4.0.4pl1′ && ( strstr($useragent,’compatible’) || strstr($useragent,’Gecko’) ) ) {
if ( extension_loaded(’zlib’) ) {
ob_start(’ob_gzhandler’);
}
} else if ( $phpver > ‘4.0′ ) {
if ( strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], ‘gzip’) ) {
if ( extension_loaded(’zlib’) ) {
$do_gzip_compress = true;
ob_start();
ob_implicit_flush(0);
header(’Content-Encoding: gzip’);
}
}
}
?>

Save this file as “gzip_footer.php”

< ?php
$gzip_contents = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

$gzip_size = strlen($gzip_contents);
$gzip_crc = crc32($gzip_contents);

$gzip_contents = gzcompress($gzip_contents, 9);
$gzip_contents = substr($gzip_contents, 0, strlen($gzip_contents) - 4);

echo "\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00";
echo $gzip_contents;
echo pack('V', $gzip_crc);
echo pack('V', $gzip_size);
?>

How to use?

< ?php
include('gzip_footer.php');
include('your_template_file.php');
include('gzip_footer.php');
?>

Pros:
- page being compress and now have smaller file size
- It takes shorter time for user to download your file
- save more bandwidth

Cons:
- not all browser support gzip compression (most of the new browser support gzip)
- it takes a bit of server resources to do the compression

Credit: Webreference

Technorati Tags: compression, gzip compression, speed up website, bandwidth, web, open source, php, gzip, web server, apache module

Posted at September 14th, 2006 by chua

If you think this article helps you to solve your problem and clear your headache, feel free to buy me a drink :)