Raymond Wan wrote:
I had looked at the effect compression has on web pages a while ago.
Though not relevant to modperl, there is obviously a cost to compression
and since most HTML pages are small, sometimes it is hard to justify.
Not to discredit the work you did researching this, but a lot of people are studying the same thing
and coming to different conclusions:
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
Yes, backend performance matters, but more and more we realize that the front end tweaks we can make
give a better performance for users.
Take google as an example. The overhead of compressing their content and decompressing it on the
browser takes less time than sending the same content uncompressed over the network. I'd say the
same is true for most other applications too.
As for dialup, if I remember from those dark modem days :-)
Even non dialup customers can benefit. Many "broadband" connections aren't very fast, especially in
rural places (I'm thinking large portions of the US).
But all this talk is really useless in the abstract. Take a tool like YSlow for a spin and see how
your sites perform with and without compression. Especially looking at the waterfall display.
--
Michael Peters
Plus Three, LP
