Compression

[Henrik Vendelbo <hv...@bluprints.com>]

Sure this is a tricky thing. If we can send compressed text instead of text over the internet it should help the bandwidth, but I think the problem is twofold if proper performance improvement is to be reached.

1) The .html .xml .text files would have to be uploaded in a compressed version. I mean this is a web server, not an application server, and the compression feature could easily be added to modern tools.

2) The browsers would need a standard for accepting the zipped version, that sounds like a new HTTP version to me. Browsers that support compression would then add a flag in the HTTP header when requesting a page. Then if an older browser requests the page, the server will decompress it before transmitting.

This solution would allow for transition and leave the descision up to the webmaster. If no compressed pages are uploaded the feature is never used. Generated pages by Servlets/PHP/Perl/ASP/JSP etc. would just be handled normally as uncompressed pages.

The performance of the webserver would be improved by quicker disk access and transfer time, but degraded when decompressing. I'm no compression specialist, but I believe that would end up as an improved server performance on most systems (given a choice of a compression that i quick to decompress). Over time browsers would support the feature taking over the decompression task.

thoughts ?