Apache statically and dynamically compressed content

I have a website which has both dynamically generated (PHP) and static content. Setting up Apache to transparently compress everything in accordance with content negotiation is a trifle.

However, I am interested in not compressing static content that rarely, if ever, changes, but instead serving precompressed data in an "asis" manner.

The idea behind this is to reduce latency and save CPU power, and at the same time compress better. Basically, instead of compressing the same data over and over again, I would like the server to sendfile the contents without touching it, but with proper headers. And, ideally, it would work seamle开发者_如何学Gossly with .html and .html.gz files, using transparent compression in one case and none in the other.

There is mod_asis, but this will not provide proper headers (most importantly the ones affecting cache and proxy operation), and it is agnostic of content negotiation. Adding a content-encoding for .gz seems to be the right thing, but does nothing, the ´.html.gz` web pages appear as downloads (maybe this interferes with some default typemap?).

It seems that the gatling webserver does just what I want in this respect, but I'd really prefer staying with Apache, because despite anything one could blame Apache for, it's the one mainstream server that has been working kind of OK for many years.

Another workaround would be to serve the static content with another server on a different port or subdomain, but I'd prefer if it just worked "invisibly", and if the system was not made more complex than necessary.

Is there a well-known configuration idiom that makes Apache behave in the way indicated?