Gzip compression

Well, I know about gzip from using linux, but I've now seen som stuff about compressing web pages. Being crazy about efficiency this has interested me, and now I'm curious.

I was suprised that IE would support such a thing and I i'm also wondering if the payoff of d/l speed against the time to compress and uncompress.

Has anyone used this technology, and does anyone know of a really good source of info? I tried googling but didn't find anything really useful.

That's funny. I was just reading about this very thing last night in my new book "Speed Up your Site - Website Optimization (New Riders)" and am also curious to know more.

I'm going to be watching this thread VERY closely.

just as easy way to compress databases aint it?...

nah, im not 100% sure, i will have a look around

I think you'll be watching closely as it drops of the bottom of the page. I get the feeling this is one of those obscure things that no-one really cares about!

Well what I found out last night was that you can do it with an apache mod, but that will compress everything that gets sent out, including images and pdfs, which are already compressed. So then you start having to write complicated .htaccess files so you don't waste a whole bunch of system resources.

Alternatively you can buffer the output and compress it in PHP. This sounds like the best plan to me, as it's probably only worth compressing the plain text files anyway. That info I got from here:

http://www.zend.com/zend/art/buffering.php

Generally, info I found suggests that it can save 50-80% on filesize for plain text (which sounds about right to me).

Also thinking about it, the system resourses used would be tiny, just to compress a 10k file.

Whether or not it's worth it, I don't know.