Question

DeflateCompressionLevel and other directives just don't work in Ubuntu 14.04

I have looked at the mod_deflate tutorial and tried to reduce the compression level as instructed midway through that tutorial.

But, no matter where I place the compression level or other directives, apachectl configtest fails with the following error:

root@host:/etc/apache2/mods-enabled# apachectl configtest
AH00526: Syntax error on line 21 of /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf:
Invalid command '\xe2\x80\x8bDeflateMemLevel', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
Action 'configtest' failed.
The Apache error log may have more information.

Here’s how my deflate.conf looks in Ubuntu 14.04 and the three directives there are what I am trying to add:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
        <IfModule mod_filter.c>
                # these are known to be safe with MSIE 6
                AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

                # everything else may cause problems with MSIE 6
                AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
                AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript application/javascript application/ecmascript
                AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
                AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
         </IfModule>
</IfModule>

# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

Here are the values I am trying to add to the file:

DeflateCompressionLevel 7
​DeflateMemLevel 8
​DeflateWindowSize 10

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Accepted Answer

Hi @cloudnine

From the error Invalid command '\xe2\x80\x8bDeflateMemLevel' it looks like the file contains UTF-8 characters, which I don’t think is supported. Try creating a clean ASCII encoded file.

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