Speed Up Your Site – Using HTTP Compression!
George Petrov, founder of DMXzone, Flashfreaks and the Dynamic Zones network assesses httpZip, a production utility that compresses the files sent to a browser, saving bandwidth and money!
The Production test
Now that the first test was completed we went ahead and
installed the latest version of httpZip on our production server.
The one thing we were really curious about was how much
extra work the CPU had to do to perform the extra compression, so we tracked
the CPU usage for some time to see how much it really increases.
As expected, the CPU usage did increase - but definitely
not as much as I expected. Our average CPU usage had been 30-40% and now it
was 40-50% which was totally acceptable to us. Also note
that our sites are fully dynamic - so that the ASP pages get run every time
again and again, so we don't really gain much from the httpZip caching.
A site that has more static content as well will definitely profit from httpZip
with much less extra CPU usage.
Media compression
Running our production test and looking at the generated
statistics I noticed that httZip also compresses some standard media files as well!
On FlashFreaks we have a whole library of sounds in WAV format and those are
automatically compressed - giving us an additional 15-35% compression on WAV
files which is not bad at all!
Also as we allow images upload - it seems that some of our
users have uploaded BMP files. We get those compressed as well - up to 95%!
Conclusion
We found that httpZip is a useful product that allowed us
to achieve great bandwidth with not much CPU overhead, and it is an easy installation.
We were able to decrease the monthly bandwidth usage of FlashFreaks with about
35-40% thanks to httpZip.
The one thing that you have to take in mind is that you
don't use this product on an already overloaded server where the CPU usage
is already 100% - but this is rarely the case.
Also I'm looking forward to the new upcoming version of
httpZip 2.0 which will further reduce the CPU usage to a minimum and use even
greater cache techniques.
httpZip
costs $299.95 for a single server running unlimited domains and is available
for free trial at http://www.port80software.com/products/httpzip/try
George Petrov
Founder - www.DMXzone.com
DMXzone
George Petrov is a renowned software writer and developer whose extensive skills brought numerous extensions, articles and knowledge to the DMXzone- the online community for professional Adobe Dreamweaver users. The most popular for its over high-quality Dreamweaver extensions and templates.
George is also the founder of Wappler.io - the most Advanced Web & App Builder
See All Postings From George Petrov >>
Reviews
Compression results
Nice review. I also recently did some tests with httpZip and thought it was a pretty good product. Their support was great and very helpful.
However, one point that is easy to miss is how compression will affect your actual bandwidth usage. I had httpZip set up to only compress HTML pages (leaving images, etc. uncompressed). httpZip reports that it was saving 30% bandwidth which was true. But this % savings is really 30% of that bandwidth that HTML files use. Since HTML files make up about 30% of my total bandwidth, the reduction in TOTAL bandwidth usage was more like 10%.
I just thought I'd point that out so that people out there don't think they'll be seeing a TOTAL Bandwidth reduction of 35%-40%.
RE: Compression results
We really saved 30% of the total bandwidth. Html/asp files were compressed by 80% so it is not only html compression I'm talking about. The total compression is about 30% because other types of files were compressed (like WAV, BMP) that are less well compressed.
willt this be availeble for apache also?
will this plugin be available for apache to?
greets
I3lair
Ping your website
One thing not mentioned is memory preasure on a webserver. Most servers host 100’s of websites & if yours is not one of the most popular then your code will not be in memory. A popular method to get around this is to ping your web site. This will keep the site in the servers memory and keep your site responsive. I use a free service called Site Stalker (http://sitestalker.prestigedevgroup.com). They also collect stats on how often your site has outages and average response times.
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