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Compressing Apache output with mod_deflate on Centos

Apache on Centos ships with mod_deflate installed and enabled by default.  To check this you can grep your config file and make sure the line which loads it is not commented out.

 cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | grep LoadModule deflate_module

When Apache loads it reads all the config files (ending in .conf) in /etc/httpd/conf.d so we'll add configuration options for mod_deflate into this directory. Lets use a file called deflate.conf to specify the config: 

 <IfModule mod_deflate.c>  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript  
  DeflateCompressionLevel 9  
 # Browser specific settings  
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html  
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip  
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html  
  BrowserMatch \bOpera !no-gzip   
 </IfModule>

You can check it is working by noticing your YSlow report now shows, by using an online tool, or by just checking the headers with Chrome or Firefox's developer tools.

If you're using Varnish and Apache does not have mod_deflate then you can enable gzip in your vcl as per the Varnish manual.  The page linked at the bottom of the Varnish manual ( How GZIP, and GZIP+ESI works in Varnish ) explains how the response from the backend is stored in a compressed state.

  sub vcl_fetch {  
    if (beresp.http.content-type ~ "text") {  
        set beresp.do_gzip = true;  
    }  
 }
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