Hi guys, my forum is 4 years old with lots of posts, with about 2k members though only a few hundred are active over each month. It seems to run moderately slow at times, and so I'm tweaking what I can. For PALS, I have Who's Online, ShoutBox, Recent Posts from 1 forum, and a custom pal for my FlashChat that shows who's chatting. Forum list loads in 3.859 seconds for me in Firefox with a DSL connection.
Which do you think is better, enabling gzip via the forum cpanel, or adding this to my site's .htaccess (which I saw in another thread here):
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html .js
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php
php_flag zlib.output_compression on
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 1
The times seem pretty similar, but I was just wondering your informed thoughts on this.
And the devil inside me wonders what would happen if I enabled both and suppressed error messages? Faster but more server load? Armageddon?
As an aside, my Expression Engine blog on the same domain has a GZIP option via cpanel, but I tried leaving that on AND putting the code above into my htaccess, and the blog does seem to load faster than with either one separately. But it's much smaller and less visited than my forum.
Thanks for your thoughts!
