Accelerate your Website With GZIP Compression

By Dino Fancellu
March 15, 2004

We recently configured SoftwareReality.com to use GZIP compression, and got an instant improvement in load times. This page includes some notes and further reading on how to configure your website to use GZIP.

The front page has gone from a rather hefty 28260 byte download to a mere 5794 bytes. The improvement of the stylesheet page (style.css) was even better - 10753 bytes compressed down to 1444 bytes! We saw similar results at Javelinsoft.com.

It seems to average out at about 80% compression, 4/5 reduction. Images can also be compressed, but it's probably better to leave them well alone, as they likely already are compressed (in fact, adding GZIP compression can sometimes make images larger to download).

This top-1000 survey of company websites that use (or don't use) compression makes for interesting browsing. Most companies and most websites don't bother with compression. The result is a bloated web experience, wasted bandwidth, and super-slow page downloads for poor 56K modem users. (Of course, we can take this moral high ground now that SoftwareReality is compressed!)

Slashdot, on the other hand, is lovely and GZIPped - absolutely essential for a site that attracts hundreds of thousands of hits each day.

Accelerating Your Own Website - Some Pointers

If you want to configure your own website to use GZIP, it's pretty straightforward - although there are one or two "gotchas" to be aware of.

If your website uses Resin, it's easy - just put:

<filter-mapping url-pattern='/*'
filter-name='com.caucho.http.filter.GzipFilter'/>

inside your <host> or <web-app> - but see the comments on pdf files below.

Similarly in Tomcat, just add compression="on" to your coyote connector, and you'll get gzip on larger pages. See their config page for more info.

If you have Apache at the front, leave it to Apache. See this page for Apache 1.3, or this page for Apache 2.x.

(Don't forget to load module inside httpd.conf, e.g. LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so)

There's also a whole site about web compression at webcompression.org - definitely worth a look.

Unfortunately, GZIP breaks pdf downloads (e.g. the EJB's 101 Damnations file).

So you'd need to configure a more selective URL pattern to make sure not everything gets compressed (e.g. only compress *.jsp).

Talkback

Post a new message

GZIP in iPlanet server
sathya sat_adi2002
Need a way to compress a JSP..
Sridhar sridhar_shanbogh@yahoo.com
Need a way to compress a JSP..
Sridhar sridhar_shanbogh@yahoo.co.in
Will iplanet support gzip compression?
Rajendra ugrani_open@yahoo.co.in
Doubt in GzipFilter
saravanan jayasaravanan@gmail.com
Gzip corrupting the tabcontainer ajaxtool
amit amit_deoria@indiatimes.com
enable GZip compression on iPlanet
Arun arunbea@gmail.com
Helpful
bobby monkey@yahoo.com

Post a new message

More articles by Dino Fancellu:

Code-Generate Enterprise Applications With JGenerator

How to Write a Functional Specification

<< Back to Programming

<< Back to Software Reality