Advanced Performance Techniques

Compression solves depression

Most modern browsers (Netscape 4.5+, IE4.01+) allow for content to be ‘gzip’ (or ‘deflate’) compressed.  Plain text (i.e. HTML) can significantly compress, and as long as the web server has some spare CPU power for the compression algorithm, heavily content driven sites can benefit significantly from gzip encoding.  Recent Box UK statistics show that compressing content-heavy sites can reduce the size/speed of the HTML download by an average of 75-80%.