Hi all, we did a lot of performance rules, with great results. One thing we should still do is GZIP for html, css, js and other text files.
But about this subject we have a discussion. Is GZIP also usefull on high bandwidth connections? I know that GZIP takes CPU-time. Some people say that nowadays compressing content is not always smart, because of better connection speeds.
Any thoughts on the subject? Should we hesitate to deploy GZIP (apart from the fact that our caching layer has problems to use gzip…
Yes, GZIP is still very useful, even on infinite bandwidth connections. The way TCP works, it takes a few round trips to ramp up (particularly early in a connection) so anything you can do to reduce the amount of data you have to deliver ensures that you get more delivered sooner.
Generally its a good idea to gzip resource files. I remember google chrome had an extension Speed Tracer, that was able to monitor what amount of time browser spends on specific things.
Perhaps you should give something like that a try and check the results, as the server can gzip content with a click or two.
I would love to activate Gzip ‘with a click or two’. Problem is we use Squid on a multi-server platform. And activating Gzip with Squid is not easily possible. We have done almost all performance stuff front- and backend, only thing left is GZIP… :-(.
So anyone with pointers to Squid and Gzip… tell me :-). (and I already know the usual URLs for this…)
Run Nginx or Apache Traffic Server as a reverse-proxy in front of squid (seems to defeat the purpose of using dquid but I assume you’re doing more than just proxying with it)?
If you’re only using it as a caching proxy in front of the web servers there are a lot of better options. Off the top of my head (in no particular order):
Varnish
Apache with mod_proxy
Apache Traffic Server
Nginx
I’m pretty sure most of them also perform better than Squid and you can configure them for load balancing and automatically removing dead servers from rotation, etc.
This is slightly on a different issue, but still talking about GZIP. I tried turning on GZIP and found reports from visitors running older windows machine on older IEs (probably XP and IE6/7) having prompts that they have to download a certain file before the page can be rendered. Is GZIP not supported on those old browsers?
We’ve been using gzip for a while now, our customers sometimes have old browsers, and so far no issues. I believe IE 5 and older netscapes had issues with certain files (.js, .css) being gzipped, but those browsers are virtually non-existent these days (thank god for that…). To me this sounds more like an http header issue. You should capture the http headers being sent to those browsers and make sure they match the standards and/or are not malformed. Sometimes just spacing being off can cause issues with the older browsers.
