jmtd → log → mod deflate
I was surprised to learn that Debian's apache2 package does not enable
mod_deflate
by default. This is the module which implements compression.
Once enabled, I needed to add application/atom+xml
to the configuration in
order for it to apply to atom feeds (which are the most consistently fetched
URI on my site generally, although right now the image from my last log post
is in the lead by a huge margin).
I'm not sure how much merit there is in compressing atom feeds. My primary one
is 4.8k in size and compressed to roughly 1.6k at the time of writing. The
difference in time for fetching those two sizes is dwarfed by connection
setup/tear-down and possibly by the CPU time used for compression. I wonder if
mod_deflate
caches the compressed copies? Since my feed (and entire site) is
statically generated by ikiwiki, I could generate compressed copies once at
build-time. Perhaps apache2's content negotiation could be configured to serve
these up.