> >To understand the gain in bandwidth just try this URL:
> >http://12.17.228.52:7000/
> >This will rate your browser capabilities to handle compressed HTML and the
> >speed gain from it.
> >For a mainly text web site the gain is between 4x to 5x...
> >Here is the article from the w3c that explain the advantages to enable
> >compression on web server against the increase of CPU load.
> >http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html
> >"The addition of transport compression in HTTP/1.1 provided the largest
> >bandwidth savings,
> >followed by style sheets, and finally image format conversion, for our test
> >page. "
> >Another article about compression:
> >http://webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/
> >If mod_gzip were by default configured with apache, it would make Mandrake the
> >fastest web server distribution. Remember the last Internet mile is often
> >28.8kbps modem. Any compression scheme is welcomed.
> >Any volunter to add this module into cooker?
> >If nobody, I will test and report...
> IIRC telephone-modems do this already. They send the page compressed
> over the phone-wire. But seeing that you are paying for the link
> between apache and the net i definitly understand it why you want it.
As someone who regularly transfers large files (5MB-700MB) over a modem
link, I can state that gzip compression is significantly better than that
achieved by the modem alone. I for one would notice an improvement on web
servers with mod_gzip.
Michael
