Mark Hensler — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:29:20 +0000

This is nothing new. And IMO, you shouldn't have to pay for software to take advantage of this technology.

PHP has supported compressed output since version 4.0.5 with ob_gzhandler(). And I believe you could do this manually with prior versions with the Zlib Compression Functions... as long as you had the zlib library (1.0.9+) installed and compiled with PHP (--with-zlib).

I'm not aware of any ASP routines that do this, but I wouldn't be surprised if you found some Open Source scripts on perhaps http://hotscripts.com

How this works:
An 'Accept-Encoding' header is sent as part of the HTTP Request headers (by most browsers). This header (comma delineated) tells the server which types of encoding the browser understands. If you're server can support an encoding type that the browser understands, send an appropriate HTTP Response header ('Content-Encoding') and send all standard output in compressed form.

In the case of PHP, ob_gzhandler() will automatically check this header for 'gzip' or 'deflate'. If present, PHP will gzip all standard output before sending the data to the client. If the header does not contain 'gzip' or 'deflate', all standard output is sent to the client uncompressed.

More info can be found in RFC 2616 section 14.3:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/rfcdoctype.pl?loc=RFC&letsgo=2616&type=ftp&file_format=txt
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

Christian_SEO — Fri, 16 May 2003 02:46:49 +0000

I was not aware that decompression was built in to modern browsers, but their site is pretty "snappy".

This is NOT an inexpensive product, but it does have a free trial, so whay not download that puppy and give it a spin?

It's an ISAPI module which can add overhead, but if it does what they say it could help quite a bit.

At some point you WILL have to still upgrade and $1,500 will go along way in that direction.....

Thanks,
Christian

mairving — Fri, 16 May 2003 01:44:09 +0000

I haven't seen that particular one but I am a little leery of their claims.