I've heard numerous times on the benefits of compression through GZip on websites; hell we use GZip on our forum...
I've been wondering on the best possible solutions on applying compression globally over a site and found the most simple thing ever; best of all, it allows you to "tinker" with the ouput...
.htaccess
php_value auto_prepend_file /full/path/to/begin_gzip.php
php_value auto_append_file /full/path/to/end_gzip.php
begin_gzip.php:
<?php
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
?>
end_gzip.php
Done!
There are many other ways of accomplishing the above, this way is recommended as it allows you to being able to manipulate the buffer once a page has run (adding things like highlighting, correction of common coding bugs, caching, etc).
If you have scripts that also use GZip you'll need to disable GZip compression within them otherwise they will conflict with this, hence why we're not planning on running this here at
UGN Security until we upgrade the forums again.
Original Source for this can be found
here