Speed up your php files

Anon

I read this from another forum.. is this true and can someone explain more clearly how it's done?

I heard somewhere that by using php's ob(gz_handler); function (in php 4.0 above I think), makes your site go about 100% faster, because it compresses the HTML 10 times round before sending it to the user, making your pages much smaller...
Here's how to do it (or so I was told)...

first create a .htaccess file and into it insert the following:

code:

php_value auto_prepend_file /base/urlof/yoursite/gzip.php

I just called it gzip.php you can rename it...

Secondly, in gzip.php (or whatever you've called it), insert the following:

code:

<?phpob_start(ob_gzhandler);?>

That's it ! all you have to do now is insert this into your root directory on your site...

This should work, but I am not claiming that it does (in truth I have noticed a dramatic speed increase on my site), but has anyone else heard about this or know of any other ways this could be achieved ?

100% faster almost sounds unbelievable

Please post your comments !

Chris.

baruch

It should reduce the latency for your site to appear, it will also reduce the site bandwidth requirements. It will not speed your application itself, probably it will slow it a bit as it needs to compress the data and not just send it away.

The overall result depends on your site, if your scripts generate pages on the order of hundreds of kilobytes than you will gain quite a bit. If your pages are in the order of 1 Kilobyte you will hardly gain anything.

As usual in performance tuning, find what you need and then benchmark and profile your site to see what are your bottlenecks and fix those bottlenecks, doing anything else is just a waste of time.

Anon

And keep your audiance in mind. This doesn't have much effect on speed unless people viewing your site are on slower connections. There really is no difference between a 10K and a 1K site in terms of download time for a user sitting at the end of a nice cable modem or DSL line, but the difference will be notable for someone on dialup.

Anon

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: phpob_start() in /home/bjland/public_html/i/inc/zipper.php on line 1

ahhh what does that mean????

i have Version 4.0.4pl1 of php...