is this true? “Gzipped items will not have the same etags (even if the content did not change)”

Question

Is it true that we should disable etags if we are compressing with apache because the etags will be different each time? Is it true for deflate too?

Thanks

Answer 1

Apache uses inode number, modification time and/or size of the file in the filesystem to generate the entity tag (see FileETag directive). And compressing just the output with mod_deflate will not change the inode number, modification time or file size.