grafana speedup

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grafana uses the json data format to transfer data to the browser. While json is easy to work with, it is really bandwidth inefficient. This may not be a problem on a ~~local~~ fast network, but I use grafana through a 10 Mbit/s internet access, so it can be painfully slow.

But http traffic can be compressed , and apache obviously support that.

apache configuration

Edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/default-ssl.conf, add the mod_deflate configuration to <VirtualHost>:

...
      <VirtualHost _default_:443>
              Protocols h2 http/1.1
              ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

              DocumentRoot /var/www/html

              <ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
                      BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
                      BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
                      BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

                      # compress content with type html, text, and css, json
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom_xml
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/json
                      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/octet-stream
                      <ifmodule mod_headers.c>
                              # properly handle requests coming from behind pr$
                              Header append Vary User-Agent
                      </ifmodule>
              </ifmodule>
...

Restart apache:
```
sudo systemctl reload apache2
```

Numbers

Here are some numbers for displaying 1 year of data, over my light-speed 10 MBit/s connection:

Test condition	Uncompressed data size	Uncompressed duration	Compressed size	Compressed duration	Gain
browser cache disabled	50.5 MB	52 s	5.2 MB	11 s	*4.7x faster*
browser cache active (second load)	45.5 MB	41 s	3.8 MB	5 s	*8.2x faster*

On the local network, the same page loads in ±4 seconds, with or without cache and with or without compression.

Compression comes at the cost of an increase in CPU load and local access may be a little bit slower (on simpler pages), but this is the price to pay to run 8.2x faster remotely.

~~~

Question, remark, bug? Don't hesitate to contact me or report a bug.