I've just moved to a new server and this morning found that while zLib is now supported under PHP, key modules were missing.
Anyhooo I had IO:String, zlib and MD5 installed under perl and still found that the PHP pages weren't compressed. I opted to go back to goo old CGI_Buffer compression and while now the missing modules had gone and pages were loading, they weren't actually compressed .. hrmm
In other words I've got the lines in ultimatebb.cgi and it's all loading without error, yet nothing gets compressed. If anybody can help then please please do, here's a beta forum and perl diver:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/perldiver.cgi
Moving to Installing and Upgrading to V6.
Oh good, the place where few ever post, thanks =).
it seems that cgi_buffer doesn't compress with the newer .pm's. We don't yet know what the problem might be. We tried it ourselves last week. It didn't throw any errors, but didn't compress either.
If we see something, we'll post it.
It seems to be compressing... For me it never compressed the forum summary pages, but only the forum listing pages. And taking a look at the cgi forum listing pages on your forum they seem to be sub 5kb (which is an accurate size). Since PHP already should be using Gzip naturally, the compression wont do anything on the PHP pages to compress them.
I have the cgi_buffer on my forum and it works perfectly. o_O
I took a look at one of the sub-CGI summary pages:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?category=1 This comes out as 15,308K and is clearly not being compressed, so I'm not sure how you saw it being compressed.
I think I have the same issue as Allen because we just moved servers and I asked for those modules to be installed, which would thus be the very latest ones.
Hmm yes that is a bit slower then my compressed forum.
It's being gzipped just fine.
Clicky .
Like I say the zLib compression via CGI_Buffer is parsing, however the page isn't physically being sent compressed. Note I'm talking about CGI_Buffer, not the method via PHP, haven't had time to fully check that, although I think it works.
Also on that page you highlight, it says the following at the bottom:
(traffic summary: 855 bytes HTTP headers + 15307 bytes content = 16162 bytes total)
I see no sign of compression, but I don't know how you're reading that output.
Either way my server physically registers a transmission of 15+K for the page, where as on the old server it'd be closer to 4 or 5K.
I'm currently trying to find the version number of the new modules vs the old ones, if they're different then I'll try to replace using the older ones.
the category display is actually an offshoot of the main forum summary, and on the forums ive tested it on has not been compressed either.
check this page:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=1&DaysPrune=1000 &submit=Go which is 6k or so
or any topic through the cgi link, which is about 4-5k, whereas saving the source comes out to about 34k.
I'm not saving the source, I'm tracking the bandwidth reception and using the 'Right-Click' method.
If you right-click on the select page (using the above as an example) then I get 51K, now if I load the same forum under my other OLD server with the older perl modules then I get more like 6K or so.
Also the physical bandwidth sent by the server is far less on the old server than the new one.
Also your top sentance, the only page that CGI_Buffer doesn't compress is the very first primary summary page, it compresses all other ones just fine and this has been known about for ages. It's only the main index that it doesn't do and nobody ever found out why =).
I've found out that the perl modules on the new server are indeed the latest, so I'm now going to try the older ones and let you know. Thats if the admin still has access to them. For the record the new ones are:
MD5 : Ver 1.7
IO::String Ver 1.01
Compress:: Zlib Ver 1.16
Ok good news, it was indeed one of the newer perl modules. Here's what we tried using instead, not that IO::String was left as v1.01:
md5 : 1.5.3 (now 1.7)
zlib : 1.12 (now 1.16)
The version in brackets is the newer one we had before, it's now on 1.5.3 for MD5 and so forth and working fine.
Note that it's stopped working on my site again, since I can't check the version numbers and we're still switching servers then it could be for any number of reasons.
The only thing I note is that they put IO::String back and I asked for it to be remove so that I could call the older version locally. Perhaps the fault is in having a newer version of IO::String on the host side, I'll let you know.
Hmm no the admin did nothing, it seems to work and then stop working at random reguardless of module version. Hmm there are a number of other less obvious modules called, but this could get ridiculous.
I give up, compression is fudged.