mod_deflate vs Django GZipMiddleware, which one to use for deployment?

Question

We're deploying Django apps with Apache 2.2 + mod_wsgi. Should we enable mod_deflate in Apache or use Django's GZipMiddleware? Which option performs better?

Answer 1

It depends. If you enable it in Apache, then it will also be used for static content (e.g. CSS, Javascript, images); but some static content (like JPG, GIF, SWF) is pretty well compressed anyway.

Answer 2

You should probably test to know for sure, but if I were to guess, mod_deflate would be better for requests that totally bypass Django completely (like zipped up static resources that should be deployed separately i.e. media).

For things that are already generated by Django responses, it's probably a toss-up -- in either case it would be native code doing the zipping.

Answer 3

I would definitely go with mod_deflate, on the assumption that you have static css and js files which apache is serving directly and can also be compressed.