/usr/man/cat.3/Compress::Zlib.3.Z

NAME

       Apache::Compress - Auto-compress web files with Gzip

SYNOPSIS

         PerlModule Apache::Compress

         # Compress regular files - decides whether to compress by
         # examining the Accept-Encoding header
         <FilesMatch "\.blah$">
          SetHandler perl-script
          PerlHandler Apache::Compress
         </FilesMatch>

         # Compress output of Perl scripts
         PerlModule Apache::Filter
         <FilesMatch "\.pl$">
          SetHandler perl-script
          PerlSetVar Filter on
          PerlHandler Apache::RegistryFilter Apache::Compress
         </FilesMatch>

         # Guess based on user-agent
         <FilesMatch "\.blah$">
          SetHandler perl-script
          PerlSetVar CompressDecision User-Agent
          PerlHandler Apache::Compress
         </FilesMatch>

DESCRIPTION

       This module lets you send the content of an HTTP response as gzip-com-
       pressed data.  Certain browsers (Netscape, IE) can request content com-
       pression via the "Accept-Encoding" header.  This can speed things up if
       you're sending large files to your users through slow connections.

       Browsers that don't request gzipped data will receive regular noncom-
       pressed data.

       Apparently some older browsers (and maybe even some newer ones) actu-
       ally support gzip encoding, but don't send the "Accept-Encoding"
       header.  If you want to try to guess which browsers these are and
       encode the content anyway, you can set the "CompressDecision" variable
       to "User-Agent".  The default "CompressDecision" value is "Header",
       which means it will only look at the incoming "Accept-Encoding" header.

       Note that the browser-guessing is currently using a regular expression
       that I don't think is very good, but I don't know what user agents to
       support and which not to.  Please send me information if you have any,
       especially in the form of a patch. =)

       This module is compatibile with Apache::Filter, so you can compress the
       output of other content-generators.

TO DO

       Compress::Zlib provides a facility for buffering output until there's
       enough data for efficient compression.  Currently we don't take advan-
       tage of this facility, we simply compress the whole content body at
       once.  We could achieve better memory usage if we changed this (at a
       small cost to the compression ratio).  See Eagle book, p.185.

AUTHOR

       Ken Williams, KWILLIAMS@cpan.org

       Partially based on the work of several modules, like Doug MacEachern's
       Apache::Gzip (in the Eagle book but not on CPAN), Andreas Koenig's
       Apache::GzipChain, and an unreleased module by Geoffrey Young and
       Philippe Chiasson.

SEE ALSO

       perl(1), mod_perl(1), Apache::Filter(3)

perl v5.8.8                       2004-11-17                       Compress(3)
See also Compress::Bzip2(3)
See also Compress::Zlib(3)