My Blog from Wordpress as well as my website run like a snail on an apache server. ( I have a lot of pictures there, which are already compressed as fas as it goes)

For the Wordpress blog all of it is in php including AJAX, I wanted to know if it is better to change the compression in in the php.ini on and or add following to my htaccess file

php_flag zlib.output_compression on
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 9

As I'm a newcomer to php as well as the apache server my knowledge is quite like zero -

Hosting technology is in VDS which gives me some freedom, which of course can be dangerous too

I hope some of the experts can advice me what to do.
My hosting companies support is none existend in this case. They just don't like to get involved.

Some popular scripts already include options to compress the web pages or not. I will assume a popular script like wordpress may already offer such an option. I am not certain, because the only 3rd party scripts I have ever used is phpBB, phpadsnew and vbulletin (and all 3 have this option!).

It's much better for you to enable the option from within the script than to do it server-wide, in other words, modifying php.ini.

Setting this in .htaccess is however something you can consider (maybe for scripts you write on your own).

php_value zlib.output_compression_level 9

Don't set that at 9, 1 is perfect! i.e.
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 1

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J de Silva
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Thank you JDS
I experimented with that particular script in .htaccess and it looks like it works fine.

Lowered the compression level as you suggested, I heard that there is not much to gain if it set at a higher level, except a higher load on the server.

Yes there are some 3rd party scripts out which include caching for wordpress, but they all have some issues. Thats why I stayed away from them.

At present time I'm experimenting with another way to speed up php. It includes also all html pages with a very smart and small php script. Looks very promising at the moment. I prefer this one as it takes care of both issues the php side as well the html side.