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Hello,

I just recently began using Joomla to develop my site at http://www.gobozzy.com and I started to use the http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/index.html tool to test my website download speed.  For T1, my site was downloading at a little bit more than 8 secs.  The site suggested that I cut down on white space so I started with my CSS files.  I noticed there were a lot of extra carriage returns; sometimes 2-3 newlines between each line of code.  I immediately saw about a 20% reduction in file size.  Anyway, after editing 3 CSS stylesheets, my T1 download time was down to about 6.8 secs!!! 

I will continue to cut down on white space all the other files (ex. php, html...).  By the way, thank you Joomla, for making this all possible for me.  I have always wanted to build a professional looking website without having to have a 10-man team.

Or you could just turn on gzip compression, which generally gives about 30% improvements in file download size, including stripping whitespace and compressing textual content as well. It's also a single click option, assuming your server supports gzip, which most do.

Cool...thanks for the tip!  I'll give it a shot right now and let you know how it turns out.  Are there any downsides to using gzip compression though?

some extra cpu load

The CPU load for gzip is fairly low, and can usually be offset by caching the gzipped output on first generation. How well this works depends on the individual site though: lots of individual tailored pages will mean more load than a basically static site without user login. Depends what is the more critical factor - for me, using a bit extra CPU is acceptable (have CPU cycles to spare!), but my time is limited.

I turned on gzip compression, however, I didn't see a decrease in download speed 

If your page is taking over 6 seconds to load on a T1 connection, I suspect the problem is more likely to be lots of images, which won't be affected by gzip or whitespace reduction - you'll have to look at increasing the compression level when saving as jpg or png (for png, you can sometimes get dramatic filesize reductions by reducing the colour depth of the image, if it doesn't need all the colours it is currently catering for).

Thank you for your suggestion.  I will try converting my images to png and see what happens.

Note that for photographs, you'll generally get better compression with jpg files, while a lot of logos and simple designs give better results with png. It is about making sure the most appropriate format is used for all images, not using one format no matter what!

You are right, the png looked much better than my gif that I originally used for my logo.  It only resulted in 0.04 extra seconds of download time but it was worth it.  Also, I am currently building the zlib module so I can use compression.  I can't wait to see the results!

I added the following directives to my php.ini file:

zlib.output_compression = on ;
zlib.output_compression_level = 6 ;
zlib.output_handler = ;

When I check my PHP setting via the Joomla backend, I get this:

Directive Local Value Master Value
zlib.output_compression Off Off
zlib.output_compression_level -1 -1
zlib.output_handler no value no value

I am sure that zlib is installed and enabled.  Is there anything I might be missing here?

When you modified the php.ini file, did you restart the server process? Also, are you 100% sure that the modified php.ini is the correct one: I know there are about 4 versions of php.ini on my system, but only one of these is actually used.

I am pretty sure because my hosting service only provides me with one php.ini file that is in my root directory when I log in.  There is a little bit of good news though.  My page is down to 5.54 seconds download time.  Also, in the report, it says "This site is using HTTP compression, otherwise called content encoding using gzip."  Since I am using gzip now, would it be worthwhile trying to get the zlib going?

If it's compressing content, it's working. 5 seconds isn't amazing, but it is just about acceptable, if the page is usable before that (ie. it's loading images etc. after the text has appeared). I wouldn't worry abotu zlib - I suspect that some other compression code is lying around somewhere, probably in one of your server modules.