Of course, it had to happen. My recent obsession with lighttpd ran into a huge stumbling block. Apparently lighttpd won't serve up the Etag header when you run stuff through mod_compress. Boo. This means you're forced to choose between compressing or caching. That sucks :(

I'm tempted right now to settle for turning off mod_compress, since I'm minifying all the CSS and JS on my static-content server anyways, so the gzip boost isn't entirely necessary (although I'm sure it would still help).

Update: A bit of mucking around and I discovered I *can* have Etag with mod_compress! All I have to do is turn on the compress.cache-dir variable! Yay! (seriously, i'm pretty excited right now ... lame)