GZipping... Blimey!

are there any known drawbacks?

[rpking]

We've just discovered an NT version of GZIP. For those who don't know, this software will zip up data before sending it back to the browser. It only performs this for browsers using HTTP 1.1, which have the deflation software built in, ie. IE and Netscape 4 upwards.

The whole process is transparent, and although the server does more work, the client downloads approxiamtely 10-20% of the original file size. (with an ASCII file such as HTML or .css etc).

This vastly improves download speed and saves bandwidth. However, I know there can be performance issues, especially as 95% of our site is dynamic, which rules out caching.

Does anybody have any bad experience of GZip server side software, or is the the holy grail!

[Rusky]

Hi rpking

Did you find out about this on the web if so could you post the URL or stickymail me it?

Cheers

[rpking]

Search for mod gzip [google.com], which is the name of the unix module.

For NT variations, this search [google.com] has an interesting link in fourth position.

[Rusky]

cheers :)

[theperlyking]

No experience myself but i've read a couple of articles from high traffic sites where they say its been great for them (mod gzip). It is also apparently an elegant solution as it decides itself what to compress and what not to.

[Marcia]

Is there a utility that unzips gz files? Does this one do it?

Added: Guess I'll find out. Here's the GZip [gzip.org] homepage.

[msgraph]

>>Is there a utility that unzips gz files? Does this one do it?

Winzip will do it just fine. I think it's listed on that link you provided Marcia.

They just released a new beta that finally has the option of unzipping multiple files at once also.

www.winzip.com.

There is also a compression utility called bzip that puts the extension *.bz2
It is newer than gzip and also has a 10-20% better compression rate. We've been using this for our log files and it works great.

sources.redhat.com/bzip2/

There is another unzipping program out that there will handle both of the formats above. It has a free version but includes one of those spy/adware programs which can be a pain.

Godezip [download.cnet.com]