I installed and switched on mod_gzip for my Apache server two nights ago. I don’t really know if it makes a difference, but at least when I’m loading these pages on other computers, it does seem to be a bit zippier, shall we say.
Mod_gzip does require some configuration in your Apache http.conf, but examples are easy to come by. (I found this Apache and mod_gzip page to be clear and helpful.) I cannot really say I understand all of them but I’m still getting my sea legs with respect to Apache, so that’s to be expected. I’m hoping I got it right, and am not really sure if it’s working; any change I’ve experience could just be a placebo effect.
I made this change even though I’m not sure my server can handle running Drupal on Apache under any significant load to begin with. Hm. Adding gzip of every page sent out can’t really help performance on the server, but CPU is fairly cheap, even on a low end Power Mac G4. I was mostly hoping to make sure I’m making efficient use of my bandwidth.
So far, even with this change, I still feel like Apache plus Drupal is more responsive in many situations than Userland Manila 9.0 (and older version now) was on the same hardware. Perhaps it just takes advantage of the hardware resources better; it should certainly spread the load across the dual CPUs.