What are the positive and negatives of implementing:

PHP Code:

if(!ob_start("ob_gzhandler")) ob_start(); 


from what i've read about gzhandler is that browsers parse your code faster, and, who doesn't want that?

But that not all browsers support it. (and i'm not sure what browsers don't)

Originally Posted by Lashtal

from what i've read about gzhandler is that browsers parse your code faster, and, who doesn't want that?

But that not all browsers support it. (and i'm not sure what browsers don't)

Actually if anything the browser parses the code slower. What it does do is sends compressed content over the network which reduces bandwidth and download time. The browser must actually decompress the file before parsing it, which should be faster than if you had downloaded the uncompressed file instead.

Browser support should be irrelevant, as the documentation explains: "it determines what type of content encoding the browser will accept ("gzip", "deflate" or none at all) and will return its output accordingly".

I can't say with any authority how much bandwidth compression actually saves, but I'd imagine on average it is not a huge amount. If you are having issues with bandwidth give it a try and see if it helps.

Also, it seems that the compression occurs everytime a user requests a file, so you may also want to take server load into consideration (though I doubt the impact is very significant).

Does anyone know in what cases gzhandler might be necessary?

Most PHP i've ever ran has parsed almost instantaneously fast.

the only scripts i've ever had difficulties with have been scripts whose images were stored in a database (PHPizabi), and/or heavily employed tables in it's site's code (osDate).