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Jul 17, 2010 | | |I stumbled upon Matt Heaton's blog since my last post, and learnt that Bluehost offers mod_deflate.
According to Matt, "Mod_deflate basically takes certain types of files and compresses them at the server level and then sends those smaller files to you. Images, zip files, etc don’t compress well (And so we don’t compress these, but HTML files, javascript files, css files, etc compress very well".
Mr. Heaton believes that the problem with mod_deflate is its requirement of significant CPU usage on the server to use, and can cause servers to be slow, and the website(s) on that server in turn.
Matt announced that Bluehost/Hostmonster has a solution for this mod_deflate issue.
CPU usage is track in realtime every two seconds via a patch on the Apache server. If CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold then mod_deflate is temporarily suspended.
As to his preference to mod_deflate instead of mod_zip, I left a comment on his blog hoping he would reply since it was posted back in February.