Possible low hanging optimization fruit

[foxfirefey]

So, I've been doing some heavy web page optimization at my day job and on a whim I ran an analyzer on some DW pages and found what I think could be a very easy-to-make-happen optimization: we're not gzipping the JS/CSS static files when we serve them.

Examples:

* The new entry page: 221.2KiB (70% reduction) -- quite the savings when the entire bundle is 349.9 KB
* My reading page: 149.3KiB (68% reduction) -- when the total page is 541.5 K, so decent

Would this be as easy to set up as I think it would, or are there other reasons not to do it?

Comments

[alierak]

So, apparently we already do compress most of the dynamic html on the site.

root@sb-web03:~# cat /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf 
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
</IfModule>

But, it gets weirder. Some of the webservers have this kind of stuff instead:

root@sb-web01:~# cat /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf
&;lt;IfModule mod_deflate.c>
          # these are known to be safe with MSIE 6
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

          # everything else may cause problems with MSIE 6
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript application/javascript application/ecmascript
          AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
</IfModule>

Thanks to Varnish, we've presumably been caching some gzipped stuff all along, but not actively preferring it.