Speed up your home web server

If you’re running a web server from your house, you’re more than likely disappointed at the speed of it when accessing it from the outside, because your upload bandwidth (for DSL or cable) is pretty slow. There is an amazingly simple thing you can do to speed that up – enable mod_deflate which comes with apache2. It is a module that will compress the HTTP responses by zipping them up and sending less data over the wire. This article shows how to do it, and how to measure the fact that it’s working. I didn’t even know that most modern browsers are capable of decompressing gzip’ed web pages, but indeed they are. I have observed the front end to mythtv being much more responsive after implementing this change.