To gzcompress or not to gzcompress...

Hi,

I am currently compressing the output of all my pages, (still on the
beta site so I am not 100% sure of the impact).
But I have no idea if I am wasting my server CPU time or not, or more
importantly if I am making any difference to my visitor experience.
Some pages cam be rather large and they are compressed, (from 160K to
15k),

But does anybody know if compressing is worth the effort?

And if it is worth it, why do sites like Joomla offer it, but don't
make it default?
Especially given that they test if the browser supports it, (this is
what $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'] is for after all.

FFMG


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re: To gzcompress or not to gzcompress...

..oO(FFMG)
Output compression might waste some CPU cycles on a single machine if
it's done on-the-fly, but not compressing wastes network resources and
download time on many machines. Decide yourself what's more important to
you.
Why not simply test it? A network sniffer like <http://web-sniffer.net>
can show you the different sizes - compressed and uncompressed. Usually
it's worth the effort (IMHO), text files like HTML, CSS and JS can be
compressed quite good.

On one of my sites I use the Lightbox2 script (will be replaced with
Litebox2, which is much smaller). Without compression it's currently
about 104 KB (4 files, including the prototype.js framework), compressed
it's only 25 KB. Still a lot, but much better. Both versions are stored
on the server, which uses Content Negotiation to automatically decide
which version to return, dependent on the user agent's capabilities.
There are some issues with older browsers (really old ones like NN4),
which may claim that they accept compressed content, but then fail to
properly handle it (IIRC NN4 has problems with compressed JavaScript).

Micha

re: To gzcompress or not to gzcompress...

FFMG wrote:It depends on a lot of things.

Compressing takes CPU, and in general the larger the output the more
cycles required. And it depends on the browser sending a header
indicating it can accept compressed files.

Images don't normally compress well, so if you're looking to save
bandwidth on a lot of images, forget it.

But if your site is mainly text, compression will cut your bandwidth and
speed loading of your pages - especially if the client is using a slow
link (i.e. dialup). And text compression normally is pretty fast (and
efficient).

You need to look at you CPU load. If you're on a shared host, they may
or may not like the compression, for instance. Of course, if it's your
own server, then cpu load isn't as much of a concern, but bandwidth may be.

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re: To gzcompress or not to gzcompress...

Jerry Stuckle;88260 Wrote:Well I have cpu and bandwidth.
But I am running low on memory. I wonder if that wont be a problem.

On a side note, my site is running on 70% memory.
Am I still ok or do I need to install more?

FFMG


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re: To gzcompress or not to gzcompress...

FFMG wrote:Memory is one of the cheapest resources available.

Compressing files will increase memory requirements, not decrease them.
It takes memory to read the file in, then you must compress it and
send it out - which requires more memory.

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