Why aren't features like gzip enabled by default on many webservers?

Question

Having played with several web servers online, I've seen things such as goDaddy not enabling gzip by default. Same with a few IIS drops, default installs of apache, and so forth.

I keep running across servers that don't have basic things that improve your website speed turned on by default.

This leads me to two options: everyone who makes webserves packages it poorly, or I just don't understand why they've done this. It's much more likely that I don't know why they don't do this.

Could someone enlighten me as to why you would ship webservers with disabled features such as gzip, and various cache control headers?

I thought faster websites were a result of this, as per what ySlow and PageSpeed tell me all the time. What are the drawbacks?

Answer 1

"resources" - it takes ram & CPU to compress your content on the fly... a very little bit but resources nonetheless, on a site or two it's trivial, but on 1000 or more... things can get funky. Also - Falcon's comment is valid - vendors do want the failsafe 'bare bones' configuration as the default.

-sean

UPDATE: I forgot as well: the extra execution time on each request to do the actual compression also - there is the extra memory used by loading mod_deflate [deflate_module] in the first place, so generally every process gets a little bit fatter and a little bit slower. ~ like I say, generally trivial, but if you are strapped for resources to begin with....

Answer 2

One reason could be IE6 compatibility. While IE6 supports gzip, it only does it up to 65535 bytes compressed size.

If your page is larger than that the rest will be cut off without explanation. But here's the funny part: It only happens if the page was loaded from file cache, not if it's received over the network, making the whole mess hard to debug.

It can be worked around by processing the headers of the request, but sometimes there will be a transparent proxy using IE6, eg. virus software. The proxy does not alter any User-Agent header so you're pretty much out of luck. Good thing that IE6 is almost eradicated.

Not sure if all versions were affected or only some, but the above was the reason the website I work for had gzip off for a long time.

Answer 3

You may think that it is because GZip is not supported by every browser. This explanation is wrong: a server can be backward compatible based on Accept-Encoding header of the request, which indicates whether the browser can accept GZip-compressed content.

A possible explanation is that there is no need to compress everything. Why would you compress a ZIP file, or a JPEG image? At best, the size will be the same. At worst, it will become larger.

Another factor is server-side performance. It is better to let the developer turn on compression when this developer knows the impact on the CPU and the pros and cons of ZGip for a specific content.

Answer 4

I think it's for compatibility reasons. Some clients aren't able to decompress it and in some rare cases it can break server-side functionality. The vendors probably want a failsafe default configuration.

Answer 5

The less instructions a web server needs to execute the more requests it can serve.

gzip compression takes instructions to execute, so it slows it down. If you want it you can turn it on.