Tips and Tricks

Reduce Bandwidth Consumption Using HTTP Compression

The concept of HTTP compression

By Catalin Bocanu, Web News Editor

8th of November 2007, 17:38 GMT

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Example of a HTTP Compression Test Report

There are many methods to optimize the amount of bandwidth consumed. This can be done by tuning up all factors that influence the web traffic, such as HTML, images and script file size reduction, elimination of duplicate files and more. On the other hand, the overall site performance could be improved

by using HTTP compression.

HTTP compression represents a web standard available both on client and server side that has the primary role to reduce the data transferring time between server and client. In this way the time required for page download will be lower and the amount of bandwidth consumed will be decreased. This compression/decompression process is passive and invisible for your web site visitors.

The best results obtained by applying HTTP compression will be obtained in case of files containing text in a higher percent, as compared to other elements, such as plain text HTML, CSS, XML and more. Images and movies cannot be compressed more than they actually are and in consequence the compression results will not be visible in their case. Multimedia file compression will provide optimal file sizes if it is done during the files creation.

HTTP 1.1 protocol has support for HTTP compression on both Apache and IIS servers. For example IIS 6 has built in compression support for static and dynamic web pages (server side scripts output). In order to enable HTTP compression in IIS 6, you must just check the corresponding checkboxes on Service tab from the Web Sites Properties window.

By enabling HTTP compression on server side, you can reduce the file size up to 60% - 80% in case of text files for example. As a consequence the amount of bandwidth consumption and the page loading speed will be reduced (optimized). If the caching feature is also used, then the CPU load will be reduced and the overall web site performance will be optimized.

TAGS:

HTTP COMPRESSION | Web Site Optimization | Server Optimization | Web Page Loading Speed | HTTP 1.1

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User opinions:

Comment #1 by: Blagovest on 02 Mar 2008, 22:36 GMT

reply to this comment

You can see a significant speedup if you offload your static content (images, external documents) to a different server. This is the key in optimizing the end-user experience of a website. It greatly reduces the number HTTP requests issued to the main server.

Using a service like SteadyOffload.com (http://www.steadyoffload.com) you can quickly and easily offload all the requests for static content from your server to their external cache servers. You don't have to upload anything - content gets mirrored automatically.

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