GZip those sluggish pages for better performance

[bangers]

Hi All,
Don't know if any of you have ever come across the concept of gzip for your feature rich pages but I just have used it for the first time and consider it to be a very beautiful thing.

Sure it could help most sites using javascript and css etc.

Here's an article I suggest you read if you are interested:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/

regards
Bangers

[leehack]

I like the idea, just seems to be 5 years too late. 100kb pages and reducing bandwidth are minor hurdles nowadays. I wonder if this is along the same lines of what 903 will be doing, sounds similar anyway.

[bangers]

Suck it and see.

I thing it is more relevant with the birth of Ajax. You might be suprised how much you can improve performance of sites that use big javascript libaries etc.

[pinbrook]

having read the info on gzip it is different to 9.0.3 speed enhancements.

903 uses several modules on the server inc Archive:Zip to zip files during upload transfer ie when you are publishing to web.

Gzip is utilised when a browser requests a page.

I'm going to have a play

[bangers]

Hi Jo,
I'd be interested in hearing your results. I certainly found gzip easy to implement and it had a fantastic debut on a site of mine that was having a bad day yesterday due to server performance and a spike in visitors, many pages have a large js libary, css, and flash in fact the whole shooting match on 1 or 2 of the pages).

Have a play and let me know what results you get back.

Here's the result for one of my pages, pretty successful I think you'll agree:
Web page compressed? Yes
Compression type? gzip
Size, Markup (bytes) 139,454
Size, Compressed (bytes) 8,693
Compression % 93.8

[Mike Hughes]

Hopefully the javascript, CSS, etc are stored in external files rather than on the page. Does gzip compress these as well or just the page html? and of course they should only be downloaded once per visit even if uncompressed.

Mike

[bangers]

Hopefully the javascript, CSS, etc are stored in external files rather than on the page.

Duh, yeah.

If you read more about it you'll see this is where the saving really are so gr8 for heavy js or css pages. But you set it via .htaccess to compress what you like.

I believe because it is compressed it doesn't save once to cache but you have to balance which is best for you, the saving in download size outweighs saving to cache in most cases.

Just in case your interested I got switched onto this after reading an article published by http://stevesouders.com/bio.php http://stevesouders.com/ I have atached a pp presentation he used recently. He was chief of performance at yahoo.

[bangers]

Sorry attachment was too large, it's on the web anyway

[grantglendinnin]

The fact that ~20% of the UK still uses dial up (or an equivalent) still says something - shopping online on dial up is as bad as going to the dentists. Imagine if you used gzip on your site, speed up loading times, reduce download times for dial up users = potentially a 20% increase* in revenue.

* Only kidding, move the decimal place to the left several times :D