mod_deflate - Optimal configuration for most browsers

Solution 1:

I went ahead and researched this one out. After reading multiple tutorials and the Apache doc, I was able to piece together something substantial, which seems to work well. Using the list above, I put together a set of rules/declaratives which seem to handle compression with the mainstream content types:

<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/x-js text/javascript text/css 
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/x-javascript application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/json

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
    \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
    no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary

</Location>

For testing, I basically used TamperData for Firefox and turned on deflate logging for apache:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tamper-data/

For Apache, add the following:

# For Testing Purposes
DeflateFilterNote Input instream
DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio

#LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)' deflate
CustomLog logs/deflate_log deflate

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html#deflatefilternote