mod_asis in combination with mod_deflate

[joebert]

November 5th, 2009, 10:55 pm

gzip compressed files, good.
CPU usage added by compressing files with mod_deflate, bad.

What if I compress copies of static files with gzip before hand and send those with some fancy mod_rewrite rules that check the Acept-Encoding HTTP header for gzip though ?

One way I can think to do this is to generate the files with something like wget in combination with a --header= switch to force the server to send me something I can use with mod_asis to send those files with the headers already attached. I'm not sure if that will complicate things like mod_expires though.

Another thought is just to save *.gz files and hope Apache and mod_rewrite will send the correct headers along with that compressed file. I have a feeling that's not going to work out though.

I could rewrite all requests to a PHP/CGI script that generates the headers and does a simple passthru() with the files content, but I have a feeling that's going to defeat the purpose of avoiding the much simpler mod_deflate.

Anyone ever do anything like this before, any ideas ?