Created a PHP script for gzipping static files to be sent to browsers using Apache on *nix. Now, I don't see this as a major project that'd be worth the time putting on sourceforge or something. But, any ideas on how to distribute it?
Name:
Anonymous2007-09-11 14:39 ID:biaCpV94
Since this script will never see untrusted user input I thought PHP would be best seeing it'd help those with limited bandwidth on cost-effective hosting, which 99.99% of the time has PHP and 90% of the time has mod_rewrite.
Uh, hey... have you ever run anything on shared hosting?
There's a big problem with your program here: shared hosting is almost always lot tighter about CPU usage than bandwidth. Invoking a PHP script, even if you're returning a cached gzip, will get you running into CPU time limits far, far, far sooner than you're be bumping into bandwidth limits.
Let's take a look at what your PHP script would be used on. Would it be used on bandwidth-intensive media files? No, because they don't compress. Would it be used on things like HTML? Why yes! Except that... HTML, text, et al take very little bandwidth to begin with.
So, like, unless you're running a dedicated host with a 1GB bandwidth cap, this isn't useful. Since such hosts don't exist, the idea was interesting but ultimately completely unusable in the real world.