[aklug] Re: Got compression?

On 11/22/2011 04:25 PM, Christopher Howard wrote:
> Thought of the day: I found it interesting to learn that, at the present
> time, every major Web browser supports transparent compression during
> HTTP transfers, and every major Web server supports it, but most
> everyone still doesn't use it, simply because it is not turned on by
> default in any major Web server software.
>
> This was pretty easy to set up in lighttpd. Just had to:
>
> 1. Enable mod_compress
> 2. Uncomment the config line describe the compression cache directory
> 3. Uncomment the compress.filetype line and pick which mime types I want
> compressed. In my case I picked "text/plain", "text/html", "text/css",
> "text/xml", and "text/javascript". I think most text-based content can
> be compressed, though for some reason I couldn't get it to compress
> SHTML. (Presumably some inherent incompatibility with SSI.)
>
> It's pretty cool I think because it compresses (from what I've seen) to
> about %50 for these text-based files, which is a lot of bandwidth over
> time. (It's pointless to compress images and other multimedia because
> they are usually compressed already.) And it doesn't add much processing
> overhead because it is simply gzip compression, and the compressed files
> are cached for reuse. I also read somewhere that the processing savings
> from having less packets to process actually outruns the processing
> overhead from compression (but I'll admit I don't know much about that.)
> And of course half the compression work is on the browser side, meaning
> that there is that much less work for your server.
>
> I think that the Apache module is mod_gzip, for those of you in that
> camp. There is also this nifty on-line tool for checking if a resource
> is using compression:
>
> http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/
>

There is actually a lot of ins and outs to this at present. A lot of
browsers implemented this poorly, so in the case of the majority of my
customer base (XP IE 6) it works in some spots and not in others. It can
also lead to corruption for some browsers and some file types (such as
PDFs for some browsers). So sadly it is not as simple as flipping a
switch. However, folks like Google are pushing hard for this, so I
imagine soonish, in computer terms (5 years or so) it will be universal.

This is probably the why as to why it isn't enabled everywhere, though
it is becoming more universal, it doesn't solve everything, yet.

-Erinn

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Received on Tue Nov 22 16:32:48 2011