Wow, I just enabled mod_deflate on my VPS

[Victor]

I've not long come from what I thought was a not-toooo-bad shared hosting setup that loaded my "always used for testing" 1.2 mb category page in (usually) about 4 to 4.5 seconds (as tested regularly on pingdom) ...

Upon hosting here at KH VPS that time dropped down to an average of 2.5 seconds ...

And today I finally worked out how to enable mode_deflate, the now 665kb page load speed is under 2 seconds... Very impressed, thanks KH.

 

[KH-Jonathan]

Victor,

That's certainly a nice improvement! With that small of a page you should be able to get the load time down under one second if the back-end code generating the page is nice and efficient.

 

[Victor]

Yes I'm still working on reducing images and rearranging css and js files so it actually renders faster... That test page is quite image laden heavy, the home page is now regularly under 1 second for 364kb...

Last couple of evenings now focusing on "tuning up" my htaccess file for the site... Interestingly, I've discovered by trial and error that there seems no need to add the directive:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<filesMatch "xxxxxxxx">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</filesMatch>
</IfModule>

Which pretty much every post I could find on the internet suggests is required...

I've now eliminated the above from htaccess (although kept known Mozilla browser bugs exceptions) and although content in bytes now still compressed at 606kb, page speed average times now indicates even faster.