Caching question

[Faglork]

In your experience, does caching play the same role as some years ago? I discussed that recently with a friend, and he had the opinion that nowadays there is only a neglectible difference in download speed between cached and non-cached sites, because the overall connection quality has improved in a huge way.

I for myself do not see any differences in download speed, but I am on a 3Mbit DSL, so I probably don't notice. How big is the difference with a modem connection? Has anybody compared this recently?

I am asking because I am experimenting a bit with mod_expires and just wonder whether it really justifies the effort. From a site owner point of view. Of course, from an ISP point of view it has its merits ...

What is your experience?

Alex

[ferki]

Today is more essential claim of cashing for better performance of your server. With faster connection of clients your web server can be much more exposed to traffic from them. If you are expecting few people browsing your site it is not so necessary to do caching. But if you have thousands of clients every day and your web application is more complex with many request to storage (Sql) and huge enumeratins and computation then is client side or server side cashing the right way to preserve good performance of server and server resources.

[Easywebdev]

I use mod_expires and mod_gzip.
Here is a link to a good site with tips on setting cache by file extension in the httpd.conf.

mod_gzip should help lessen any server impact from the more frequent requests.

Hope that helps.

[Faglork]

Thx! That <FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|png|js|css)$"> was what I was after. I cache by mime-type and was looking for more granularity. FilesMatch somehow eluded me ...

Did you ever have any problems using mod_gzip? Are there any downsides?

Alex

[Easywebdev]

The only problems I've ever encountered with mod_gzip is when you are serving compressed downloads, ie, zip, tar.gz, bzip 2 files. Those files will end up with the first few bytes (cant remember how many) corrupted and the download will be useless.
I get by that by using ini_set("zlib.output_compression", "Off"); before I send the headers for the download file if using php.

If you are not using php you can use a .htacces file with SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:zip|gz|bz2)$ no-gzip dont-vary

I've never encountered a problem with mod_gzip and non compressed files.