compression

Dear folks,

When we make a website using Drupal, almost every module have a CSS file and Drupal load it in every page. Just for an example, I have a small install of D7 in my machine with the core, views and ctools, just it. To load the homepage, Drupal load 13 different CSS files, including one for views, one for ctools, 4 from core (system module), 2 for fields, etc. For me, this is a huge amount of files with a big problem: each file is a request for the server (that's make the website slow).

This isn't a module, ... but it's close (like Drush isn't a module). There are a lot of tools like Drush, for quickly configuring new Drupal installations. Surely, there is a tool for combining a set of modules into one downloadable file.

Then, for windows users (where I find myself sometimes) I suppose an alternative would be to access one of my Linux servers... run a Drush + shell script that does the same thing, and then transfer the resulting file from there.

If someone put this capability together in a Web page, it might be pretty useful. I bet someone already has. Does anyone know?

Sorry, I'm sure this is addressed somewhere, but I can't find it. Can someone point me to a discussion that can help me decide whether I should be using Drupal 6 "Page Compression" or Apache2's mod_deflate?

Thanks.

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Daniel

Hello

I have set up an aggressive static page caching system using Boost module, which I modified to build gzip compressed pages to speed up load times and be able to serve more pages in less time at cuentosparadormir.com. The system works fine with just a few thousand users in a typical shared hosting account, as the content is oriented mainly to anonymous users. Of course javascript and css files are aggregated and compressed (using smartcache module).

Have anyone tried a similar approach? what do you think the limits of such a set up could be, and what should be the next bottleneck I will face for these kind of sites? do you propose any other configuration to create a high performance drupal site in a shared hosting account?