Bill Kearney

Use compression on your web server

As pages get larger and sites become popular the drain on available bandwidth can become a problem. The worst thing that can happen to a site is for it to become suddenly popular. Or an RSS feed gets pulled repetitively by dumb aggregator programs.

Many ISPs have contracts that let them bill your for increased in bandwidth use. Some ISPs are helpful in that they'll stop a site from serving up pages when it hits it's bandwidth limit. Others are quite happy to let you exceed your limit and gouge you on your next month's bill. You're either punished immediately by having your web page go offline or you get a heart-attack-sized bandwidth bill next month. Ugh.

One thing you can do to avoid some of this is to use gzip compression on your pages. The mozilla folks have an article on this from a performance aspect. WebRef's got one as well.

If you're using apache 1.3.x consider adding the mod_gzip module. For those using apache 2.0 see the mod_deflate directives. Other HTTP servers have varying degrees of features, check what yours offers and enable it.

Once you get it loaded test it via leknor. I've implemented it on my RSS feed. It reduces it from 9k to 2k. That's an over 4:1 savings. Multiply this against the number of readers and their repetitve downloading and you start to see some real savings.

It's a shame more sites don't do this. It's even more of a shame that reader programs don't ask for it. I'm watching the server logs here and on syndic8. It's disappoiting to see the client programs wasting the opportunity to save bandwidth. It's even more of a waste to see them repetitively requesting the same content at such rapid intervals. Please people, scale back your download requests to at least once an hour. There's no need to hammer on a feed every 15 minutes. I've half a mind to start showing a hit list of bandwidth wasters....