gzip or not gzip

I keep hearing that gzip your site is a good practice to speed-up delivery. My site has a very vast load in general, shall i still look into gzip? I also read about disadvantages of using gzip, such as time required to unzip contents for the browser to display. Is it true?

UPDATE:

This question is based on the assumption that the site is fairly optimized already.

Actually I optimized it already. Most of the content on my site is db driven and originally it took some time to load it all, so what I did, I wrote a few scripts that run nightly, generate content and store it as static HTML files that are included on the heaviest trafficked pages. The load on the server is way below its capacity, so, thank you for that insight, I will consider it more seriously now. I was thinking of using some PHP class that does it dynamically. Do you have any recommendations?

php gzip

Edit Report

1 Answer

I agree with @ircmaxell. You should try to optimize your app - if the database is poorly optimized or there are silly queries it will not do any magic for you. On the contrary you can not loose anything - the CPU will suffer from some additional load but it could severely decrease you bandwidth usage. Due to most modern browsers support GZIP compression it is only about the server asking client whether his browser support it. More info http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html

Maybe you should also try to use it with some of the caching modules as suggested @Andrew Sledge. Try APC :-) http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.apc.php. Also try to compress css files, images or js files. I used to generating the whole web statically and then updated only changed pages - it definitely depends on the update rate..

answered 2010-10-12T15:23:47.490

1 Answer

Your Answer