I was going to show the OSTO to Chris Tyler and earlier that day, because demos never work, I tried it, from the Seneca network.

Turns out already the OSTD is a victim of its own success. When translating the ISO Master POT file I get almost 6000 translated strings in 153 languages. I you do a bit of math – that’s a lot of text. 2.8MB in fact.

Well the problem is that 2.8MB of stuff needs to be downloaded from the server, and it can take quite a while.

Luckily Chris immediately suggested that I enable gzip compression on Apache. I thought that it was enabled by default, but I was wrong. Here’s what I was missing:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

        DeflateCompressionLevel 9

        DeflateFilterNote Input instream
        DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
        DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio

        LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)'
deflate
        CustomLog       logs/deflate_log deflate
</IfModule>

Seems to work great, thanks again Chris :)