Re: TO COMPRESS OR NOT TO CMPRS (please reply)

[Kent Fitch <[e-mail]>]

The W3C recently published an interesting note on the Network Performance
Effects of HTTP/1.1, Cascading Style Sheets and PNG image formats which 
may provide more information for this debate: 

 http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html

HTTP is a major component of my organization's WAN traffic, although maybe
it is not signficant for everyone.  Their study of HTTP/1.0 -v- HTTP/1.1
shows that signficiant reductions in packets, bytes and response time can
be expected using a persistent connection, pipelining requests on that
connection.  Compressing HTML in the application using zlib yielded a
further small improvement. Using PNG rather than GIF was estimated as
reducing payloads only slightly, but the ability to replace many images
with style sheet markup provided much bigger benefits.


Kent Fitch                           Ph: [phone]
ITS  CSIRO  Canberra  Australia      [e-mail]