Here's the problem. I have a site for users to sell stuff. Most of them include pictures which is hard on the bandwidth. A member PMed me and suggested the following. But I don't have a clue as to what he's talking about. Maybe one of you can make some sense of it and let me know if it's worth doing.
Hey,
I noticed last night that VAGT was down, when it was back up this morning, I decided to do some investigating...
The biggest problem is that nothing on the site is set to be cached by the web browser! So what happens is that everytime you go to view the same topic, the images are downloaded again. For example, when you reply, or check up on your post, or just visit the same post multiple times.
I went and pulled out the relevant useful parts out of one of my web project's .htaccess file, if you add these to VAGT you should significantly reduce bandwidth usage and page load time:
# Turn off ETags
FileETag none
# Enable expiration
ExpiresActive On
# Set js/css/images to expire far in the future so that they are cached
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "access plus 10 years"
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
