The secret is out on supercache: Good chance it won’t do any caching at all

Jim,
A programmer installed supercache on my site and it didn’t make it any faster and I worried about the extra 2 .htaccess files it put on my site conflicting with my original .htacces file. I looked inside the files and found this code

# BEGIN supercache
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
AddEncoding gzip .gz
AddType text/html .gz
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .gz$ no-gzip
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Cache-Control ‘max-age=300, must-revalidate’
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html A300
</IfModule>
# END supercache

It may look like gibberish to some but it’s not to hard to pick out the functions the file is calling for

mod_mime
gzip
mod_deflate
mod_header
mod_expires

If your webhost doesn’t have these functions enabled on their server, supercache isn’t going to do anything at all. I know for a fact that my webhost doesn’t have two of them enabled – gzip amd mod_deflate because they serve hundreds of thousands of accounts and these functions cause unnecessary strain on their servers. They recommend using wp-cache, although for visitors I have no idea what the wp-cache .htaccess file looks like, including the .htaccess file for the newer wp-cache called wp-cache2.

Roger