UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,
On a Centos 5.0 server, Apache 2.2 delivers static html page. How could I compress those html pages to gain speed and save bandwidth? is there a utility that would be effective and save?
Thanks

I think the use of mod_deflate in Apache is the only way to serve content compressed (mostly gzip) while the compression is known by the client (browser) to automatically decompress it readily (sort of). That is because some special header needs to be sent to indicate the content is compressed, and that this is sort of standardized by HTTP and de-facto implementations.

Compression will save bandwidth, but it may be detrimental to speed because content are compressed and decompressed on the fly. So much experimentation is needed to see whether that works out for you.

You can check more information at

mod_deflate - Apache HTTP Server

Thanks for the advice. I am going to study that and experiment a bit.
On a related issue, is there more upside with minifying the html files? I could collpase sequences of hidden characters into one blank space for instance. Are there tools out there to do that? I have not seen many so I am wondering if the idea is worthwhile.