I recently did a little bit of work to help speed up some things in Known, those of you watching the project will have seen work to minimise things like javascript and css.

Anyway, I ran Google insights over my Known install, and was surprised that files weren’t being compressed. It used to be the case that all you had to do was enable mod_deflate or mod_gzip on apache, but somewhere along the line the configuration must have changed.

Long story short, I needed to enable it by creating a /etc/apache2/conf.d/deflate.conf file… here’s mine:

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|png|jpg|jpeg)$ no-gzip dont-vary
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary