link checker "hang and output all page" versus "graceful progressive load"

I'd been wondering for a while why the link checker, on some machine,  
seems to "hang" forever when one launches a job, eventually giving the  
whole page in a burst, versus other hosts where the link checker UI  
and early results would first load, followed by gradual output of the  
rest of the results.

Today I eventually tracked that down to the usage (or not) of  
mod_deflate in apache. Mod_deflate will keep the whole page in store  
and output it all at once. That's nice if one has small, fast-loading  
pages… but not so much in the case of the link checker.

I removed the deflate modules from apache on both hosts for  
validator.w3.org, and now get the "desired behaviour". That might be  
worth a note in the linkchecker installation guide.

http://validator.w3.org/checklink now sports version 4.4 of the link  
checker, BTW. Gotta send it to CPAN and announce.

-- 
olivier

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 20:37:40 UTC