Wisdom of gzipping web pages

[Roedy Green]

What are your thoughts on the wisdom of gzipping web pages to be
served to the general public to view with a browser?

Does it buy you much in speed?
What percent of browsers support it?

Any non-obvious advantages/disadvantages?

 

[Daniel Pitts]

What are your thoughts on the wisdom of gzipping web pages to be
served to the general public to view with a browser?

Does it buy you much in speed?
What percent of browsers support it?

Any non-obvious advantages/disadvantages?

CPU time vs bandwidth is the main trade-off. In the general case, I
wouldn't worry about it (and would probably leave it off). For
high-scale systems, it depends on the average size of your documents,
your server CPU power, your bandwidth, and your average users bandwidth.
With so many factors that can tip the scale one way or another, it
takes an in-depth cost/benefit analysis to decide.

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

What are your thoughts on the wisdom of gzipping web pages to be
served to the general public to view with a browser?

Does it buy you much in speed?
What percent of browsers support it?

Any non-obvious advantages/disadvantages?

It can help if your pages must have lots of froufrou on them. Chunked
encoding, Keep-Alive, and Cookie scoping are worth looking up too.

 

[Roedy Green]

Does it buy you much in speed?
What percent of browsers support it?

Any non-obvious advantages/disadvantages?

I have summarised your various thoughts at
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/http.html#SPEEDUP

 

[Neil Coffey]

Personally, I didn't realize any browsers supported compressed streams
as HTTP responses, but I guess that's mainly just because I know so
little about the more esoteric details of HTTP.

In data I've collected from about 9,000 unique clients, 85% claim
to accept gzip encoding.

Neil

 

[Roedy Green]

In data I've collected from about 9,000 unique clients, 85% claim
to accept gzip encoding.

have you any idea what percent of visitors would have such an ancient
beast? or how you might characterise them?

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Personally, I didn't realize any browsers supported compressed streams
as HTTP responses, but I guess that's mainly just because I know so
little about the more esoteric details of HTTP.

IE 4+, NS 4+, OP 5+ and all FF is said to support it.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

What are your thoughts on the wisdom of gzipping web pages to be
served to the general public to view with a browser?

Does it buy you much in speed?

It can save bandwidth. I do not have any numbers.

Note that uploading gzipped web pages is not very common.

The standard is to upload normal web pages and configure the
webserver to send the content gzipped if it believes the
browser understands it.

If you are talking web services hosted in a Java EE app server,
then the Apache in front of the app server usually have plenty of
CPU power to compress.

What percent of browsers support it?

Almost all. In the 99% area.

Arne