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http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
There it is given it is good to preflush the head tag .
But I have a question will it help while using gzip ? (I am using apache2).
I think full document will get gziped at one shot and then send to the client.
or is it also possible to have gzip as well as pre-flush the head tag
EDITED
The original version of this question suggested we were dealing with HTTP headers rather than the
<head>section on an HTML document. I will leave my original answer below, but it actually has no relevance to this specific question.To answer the question about pre-flushing the
<head>section of a document – while it would be possible to do this in combination with gzip, it is probably not possible without more granular control over the gzip process than Apache affords. It is possible to break a gzipped stream into chunks that can be decompressed on their own (see this) but if there is a way to control Apache’s gzip implementation to such a degree then I am not aware of it.Doing so would likely decrease the efficacy of the gzip, making the compressed size larger, and would only be worth doing when the
<head>of a document was particularly large, say, greater than 10KB (this is a somewhat arbitrary value I arrived at by reading about how gzip works under the bonnet, and should definitely not be taken as gospel).Original answer, relating to the HTTP headers:
Purely from the viewpoint of the HTTP protocol, rather than exactly how you would implement it on an Apache based server, I can’t see any reason why you can’t preflush the headers and also use gzip to compress the body. Keeping in mind that fact that the headers are never gzipped (if they were, how would the client know they had been?), the transfer encoding of the content should have no effect on when you send the headers.
There are, however a couple of things to keep in mind:
Content-Length:header which while possible, is bad practice as it means you cannot use persistent connections. This leads on to the next point…Content-Length:header in this secenario. This is because you don’t know what the size of the body is until you have compressed it, by which time it is ready to send, so you are not really (from the server’s point of view) preflushing the headers, even if you do send them seperately before you start to send the body.In short, yes it is possible to do it, but there is no catch-all, “Yes, do it” or “No, don’t do it” answer – whether you would do it depends on each request and the nature of it’s response.