Forum Moderators: phranque
Last month we implemented a third party IIS 5 module to do HTTP compression. I've been looking at the compression statistics for the few sites hosted on the server where we installed it. Wow! We are saving on average 60-80% in file sizes and have increased page load times by 3.0 X. Our pages are already lean and mean and now with the http compression, we've crossed over into a zone that few are really looking into.
Yes, I know, all you geeks on steroids using Unix and other non MS systems have been using http compression since the net started. Well, this is new stuff for me and I'm excited! We cut the bandwidth usage of one of our sites by 40% (image intensive). Even though we do not pay based on throughput, its nice to know that we are doing our share and recycling. ;)
I guess now we can add another abbreviation to the mix of our search engine marketing services... WSO - Web Server Optimization
P.S. We're doing some other cool things too like managing cache and so forth. The third party IIS module provides online reports and statistics for each page served during a 24 hour period. Everything is viewable in one interface and the statistics are incredible. Stuff like this...
Overall Site Compression Statistics
Total Bytes Saved: **********
Bandwidth Percentage Saved: **%
Total Bytes Requested (Pre-Compression): **********
Total Bytes Sent: **********
Total Compressed Bytes Sent: **********
Total UnCompressed Bytes Sent: **********
Total Requests Served: *******
Total Compressed Requests Served: ******
Total UnCompressed Requests Served: *******
Total Requests Served from httpZip Cache: *****
Percentage of Requests
Served from httpZip Cache: **.**%
Detailed Compression Statistics for /sub/page.asp
Compressed Size of File: **** Bytes
Percentage Saved through Compression: **.**%
Original Size of File: ***** Bytes
Size After WhiteSpace Removed: ***** Bytes
Mime Type of File: text/html
Requests Served with Compressed File: ***
Requests Served from httpZip Cache: *
Total GZip compress Instances for File: ***
Total Deflate compress Instances for File: *
How many of you are utilizing HTTP compression?
What are the Pros and Cons of using compression?
The other down side, is the server overhead involved. It is pretty cpu intensive to do all that compression/decompression.
I have had trouble with Mac users and IE6 (pre SP1) whose computers do not display compressed pages (source code appears in "view source" but page does not render).
Hmmm, I didn't know they released an IE6 version for the Mac. I just checked IE5.1 on the Mac and all is okay. Browsed through about 50 pages as quickly as I could and everything seemed just fine.
I just wish google would fix their googlebot to accept compressed pages like most browsers.
Can you expand on that statement? Does Googlebot have problems with compressed pages?
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
User-Agent: GoogleBot-I-Wish-Did-This
Accept: text/html,text/plain;
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Sorry I could have been a bit clearer.
IE6 (pre SP1) on PC and Macs in general.
