HTTP Website Compression Software

any one familiar with this technology

[indigojo]

I have just stumbled across a website offering this software. has anyone here had any direct experience with it, does it work? I can sticky the URL if you need to know what product i mean

[scotty]

The technology that compresses the output of a web server is nothing new - and lots of websites out there are using it, for FREE! Have a look on mod_gzip [remotecommunications.com], which is an Apache module that can optionally compress the output if the clients' browsers support it. If client's browser sends out 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, compress', web server can then compress the output before streaming it to the browser. Most major browsers (Moz, IE, Opera, etc) support gzip encoding.

But remember, compression does not work well with images and other media files, and you will only see much effect on the text files (HTML, JS, CSS, etc).

[richlowe]

IIS supports web page compression as well.

Richard Lowe

[indigojo]

I was under the impression that IIS compression was unreliable and only supported HTML. I am particularly keen to hear of peoples experience with a product called P**EBOOST </clipped not to offend anyone> which states that it can achieve compression rates of 80 plus percent on ASP pages in particular. Has anyone used it and/or if so had any problems, ie uninstalling it and how it may of affected your server environment?
Thanks in advance

[richlowe]

Don't know about that product, but on IIS 5 compression works very well and supports scripts, applications and web pages.

Richard Lowe

[rpking]

We have used both Unix and NT solutions. We find that it works very well for larger pages with repetitive structure ie tables with loads of rows and columns.

The nature of HTML means that it compresses well, and we get up to 90% compression. To get an idea of the ratio that you would get, grab your HTML and zip it up, and compare sizes.

With a site that serves many, many very small html pages ie 4-5K, the system does not work so well. The compression adds extra load to the servers, and so is only worthwhile for pages above a certain average size.

However, if you have a lot of traffic, the bandwidth savings can be sizeable, although this is not our main reason. We do it for the surfer... they get a far faster experience of our site, especially those who are using modems.

[indigojo]

My main concern really is the load on the CPU, we are currently running a win2k server dual p3 933 with 512RAM and serving around 75k pageviews a month. The pages are mostly dynamic ASP pages and of a reasonable size 100-150kb. I believe this process increases CPU load, but by how much. I know that this would be difficult to quantify without running it a test environment so any thoughts or experience would help. Cheers

[rpking]

> 75k pageviews a month

You should be fine. I've seen compression running on machines that do 200,000 pages views per day!

However, some NT solutions are better than others. Make sure you test them in your environment, with your infrastructure, your machines and your data to see the effect.

[indigojo]

Thanks rpking, and oops i meant 750k which from what you say still should be reasonable. I will hede your advice and set up a test server. It does really seem worthwhile to me as we want our site to be as fast as possible within the confines of our budget. I am just suprised that I and people I know had not heard of this before. A lot more out there 2 learn I guess. Thanks for yor responses