The new AWEB version brings support for compressed webpages to the Amiga/MOS community.

This can speedup surfing A LOT.

Sites which send compressed content (Amazon/heise/amigaworld/thousands more...)
load much faster now.
The speed depends on the compressibility of the content. Many sites experience a speed up of 200 - 300 %.

It would be great if you enabled gzip support
on your websites (Morphzone) too?


This can very easely be done:

a) by adding this line to your php page.
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

This needs to be in your php page before you put out anything. A perfect place will be in a config-file which all your pages include.



b) Those which run their very own server can enable compression support globaly with the below setting in php.ini .

zlib.output_compression = On


If you need help, please get back to me. I'll happily assist you.

Cheers

Gunnar
gunnar@greyhound-data.com

Too bad that I dont use php on my server

Hi Robin,

Sorry I only gave an example for PHP but you can enable compression for mostly any kind of webpages.
For static HTML pages and for output generated by perl, java, ruby, you name it.

Please tell us how your website is setup and I'll try to give advice for enabling compression for it.


BTW:
In general enabling output compression will not only make the pages much faster for your visitors - it will often make your server be able to handle a much higher load too.

Busy websites often run into huge problems handling the number of simultanious users. Each user which downloads a page keeps a webserver instance busy. So for the time of the download a webserver instance consuming a couple of megabytes working ojn the request.
By enabling the output compression the user will download the pages much faster. A HTML page usually compressed to 20% of its size. So the webserver instances will be freed up after 20% of the normal time and the server will be able to handle much more simultanious users.


Cheers
Gunnar

Thanks Gunnar, I'm pretty sure there is a mod
for apache to switch this on ... I just dont have
the time atm ... Btw my server is perl only since it's
too easy to program unsafe php

The reason for me not having time is that someone
has set the dns of a website (web-netz.de) to my ip ...
so everyone who uses this website and it's tools
(banners,counters,etc) now runs into my server ...
I try to find a solution for this before I can
reorganize my server

Yes Robin,

you can enable the compression on Apache level.
Load mod_gzip for Apache 1.x3.x or mod_deflate for Apache 2.0.x


Cheers
Gunnar

I have gzip compression on MZ, it's just turned off because some amiga/mos browser or another blew chunks when I sent compressed data out...

Hi Targhan,

the idea of the compression is that the Web browser has to ask the server to send the pages compressed. The server will never send compressed data to web browser which do not ask for it.

Voyager and Ibrowse do not ask for it and will always get uncompressed pages.

I have never heard of any problems with the Amiga browsers.
And their surely can't be any as amigaworld and ann.lu
use compression too.

Please tell me if you can spot a problem.


Cheers
Gunnar

BigGun,

Okay, I turned the compression back on. I think I had some beta of aweb that asked for the gzip but then couldn't handle it or so in the past. (or was it V_beta?) Anyway, test away!


If anyone has problems please contact me at my morphos-user.com email address!

Hi Traghan,

At the moment Morphzone.org does NOT support sending compressed webpages. Are you sure that you have turned it on?


Cheers
Gunnar

Well, I turned it on from the admin interface, but there are some other issues going on right now with MZ--so that could be playing into this as well. Since I'll be doing an upgrade this weekend, it might be straightened out then

AWeb says cannot open Gadgets/Button.gadget.
What is problem ?

Wishmaster

Where did you download the binary?
When did you download it?
What compile date does the about requester say.
Why do you write here instead of emailing me?

Cheers

Gunnar
gunnar@greyhound-data.com

@ Traghan,

Please read the below as a friendly offer and please don't take it as an insult. Because its not meant as an insult but as a friendly offer.

I noticed that:
- the compression does not work yet
- and frankly, that the page creating times are shockingly slow.

Maybe I can help you enabling this on the site?
Do you have the possibiliy to install software on this host?
If yes then I would recommand that you consider installing
a PHP opcode cache to speed up the site.


Cheers
Gunnar

Sorry, BigGun.
I have downloaded it from MOS-News again.
This version is running.

@biggun

is the compression not on now? Recheck the speed too You want me to turn on page caching from the server side? I can certainly try

Hi Targhan,

nope compression is not working yet.

There are a few things which you could look at if you want to speed up the site.

a) Turn on compression for your pages.
A forum page (like the one of this thread)
is 65KB of size and will compress down to 11KB.
Enabling compression will speed-up its download by 6 times.

b) Let the webserver send expires header for your images.
You have around 130 KB of images on each page.
The webserver can send expires header to allow your visitors
to cache all the images which don't change often (like your banner). If you allow your visiting users to cache the images
then their browsers will not need to verify all these images with every click on your site. This will bring a big speedup.

c) Your page creating time of around 1 second is a bit slow.
I would expect something in the range of 0.01 seconds.
Aka 100 times faster. The creating time is based on three
things 1st parsing the php, 2nd executing the php 3rd the SQL queries. I simple way to cut down the parsing time to zero is
by installing php obcode cache.
Example: http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/

Reducing the php executing time is more difficult
and will require looking at your code.
If you believe that the database is a bottle neck than I can offer you to lock at your settings. BTW what version of mysql are you running?


Cheers
Gunnar

@BigGun

wow ... I recompiled apache with deflate-support and it's
really amazing Now I just need a V that supports compression

Thanks for the tip

@biggun

I may have to chat with you in private later. ATM, I'm a little covered up--but I would love to speed things up as much as possible with the given overhead that MZ has to work under...