I had a conversation with a well known hosting provider recently and they told me they use the default Apache configuration for their shared hosting service. When I asked if they provide gzip as an option for their users, they said no, since it was not enabled by default. When I explained to them that enabling gzip has significant benefits for end users they were very interested in turning on gzip. This company just used the default Apache config, assuming that it was reasonably well tuned by default. You can claim that they're making bad, uninformed decisions, or whatever you want to, but the fact remains: some Apache users assume that the default config is a reasonably good config, and use it as-is.
There are two classes of users out there: power users that want to tune every knob manually, and typical users that just want Apache to work out of the box. Apache developers on this list are part of the former group, which I assume is why the default Apache config is very simple. It's designed by power users, for power users. But there are non-power users out there. It would be nice if the Apache community provided configuration hints for these users. In 2010, IMO there is no good reason to have gzip disabled by default. Almost all websites enable it. There are a handful of prominent websites that do not. I've had conversations with a few of these sites. Most of them have not turned it on because they don't understand what it does, not because they don't have enough CPU. gzip has been used on the web now for well over 10 years. Only *very* old browsers, proxies, etc don't have perfect support for gzip. I can respect that the default httpd.conf is designed to be simple and minimalist. But it would be helpful to have an additional example configuration in svn trunk and as part of Apache releases, that enable things like mod_deflate. The current comments in httpd.conf explain that there are additional directives and "you have been warned" but IMO this is not very helpful or specific. We can do better. I propose providing an additional httpd.conf in the svn trunk and as part of future Apache releases that enables modules and directives that are commonly recommended on Apache performance tuning websites. This includes mod_deflate, mod_expires, etc. This will allow power users to continue to start with the current httpd.conf while typical users can just use the well optimized configuration. Hopefully this suggestion isn't too controversial. If there are concerns about some of the specific directives suggested in this thread, I'm sure we can work those out through discussion. Can we agree that it would be useful to provide an additional configuration file for non-power users that enables commonly recommended modules by default? On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Eric Covener <cove...@gmail.com> wrote: >> In case of a regular internet provider or enterprise IT or Linux >> distribution packager, I think this is very different and they have hard >> time understanding this and I believe it's important for a team maintaining >> most popular web server in the world to make such decisions for them as you >> did with other modules that are compiled in by default. > > nonsense > > -- > Eric Covener > cove...@gmail.com >
