gzip+cache-dir: What's the easiest way to port this lighty config excerpt?

[mike]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Sven C. Koehler <schween at snafu.de> wrote:

> What it does is to automatically generate gzipped representations of
> files below /web/static/ (according to their last-modified time) in the
> directory /web_cache.  I find this very handy and it greatly reduces the
> load for serving compressed files which change rarely.
>
> On nginx, however, I cannot see how I could resemble this semantic with
> only "gzip on" or "gzip_static on"--is that correct?

gzip_static on basically just checks for file.txt.gz if the request is
for "file.txt" - it is useful for pre-gzipping your content. also it's
best to keep the modified times the same so that things aren't
confused :)

you should eb fine with just gzip on; - nginx's gzipping is
-extremely- fast. it doesn't cache items by default, gzip_static is
not a workaround for that, it's actually a different -type- of
feature, and ultimately does give you a bit more control over how your
content is compressed ahead of time.

i believe most webservers have a cache dir for saving the gzipped
content so it doesn't have to re-gzip the stuff; at first i thought
nginx was crazy. but after using it i've realized that it still
outperforms everything else even with real-time gzipping...