[tokenyank]

Originally Posted by mariocaz

Hi guys,

So this Mod is secure for our forums ??

thanx

Absolutely, this modification does nothing to the vb core files, nor is it a plug in... It simply uses existing technology (mod_expires on Apache) to force local cacheing.

Originally Posted by Leo Brazil

What does it mean exactly ?

It means that no action will be taken against this mod because there is nothing wrong with it.

The mod forces browsers to cache (store files locally to avoid downloading images/files on every impression) which will 1) reduce bandwidth consumption of your forums and 2) increase the speed in which your pages will load in an end user's browser.

This mod is really for IE7 because Firefox and Opera are 'intelligent' enough to cache images and .js scripts to an acceptible level, however IE7 does not cache properly so using the .htaccess forces IE7 to cache images/.js files/swf files/etc and will also parse .js/text/.css files through an extra gzip routine which will reduce the over all bandwidth used because the files will be downloaded as compressed.

As you can see, the first impression (or any impression with an empty cache) will be a 'normal' download. So, under these conditions, the user will download 210k of files and the server will be asked for 51 different operations. However, every revisit with a primed cache, the user will only have to download 28k worth of information and the server will only be asked to perform 17 operations as the rest of the information needed will be stored on the user's own computer in their local cache.

To put it in real terms... Using this hack will save me (everyone will be different depending on how big the forum is) almost 2mb of bandwidth per 10 impressions (roughly, it's late, I can't be arsed to do the maths! ) so on a site like mine that does over 4 million impressions a month, my bandwidth consumption will be considerably lower as well as my users not being forced to download 1/5th of a meg every time they visit the site.