RE: [squid-users] Compression

It also should be noted that if websites do their images right, they will be
decently compressed already, which also reduces the utility of
transfer-compression by the web-server / proxy in that case.

But it does make a difference for an accelerator, esp. when you run a
high-traffic site, and your have to pay for bandwidth. And there is always
going to be lots of text; and compression ratios are always good with text.
If using compression means I cut my peak traffic by several Mb/s, my company
saves $$. In a situation where you run a content site that is accessed by a
lot of people at work (like my company, a major US newspaper), it is also
helpful to your users on LAN connections with a crowded (and uncompressed)
pipe to their ISP, which is growing all to common these days.

When transfer encoding is enabled and past alpha, my company will likely be
an early adopter.

Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Nils Holland [mailto:nils@tisys.org]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 8:30 AM
To: Paul Stewart
Cc: 'squidlist'
Subject: Re: [squid-users] Compression

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Paul Stewart wrote:

> Is there a way that content served via the cache could be gzipped on the
> fly? Perhaps it's already possible and I am not aware of it? My
> opinion would be that this is a win/win scenario with the cache speeding
> up delivery of content to the browser, saving bandwidth on the backbone
> connections, and also delivering the content even faster to the browser
> (especially a dial-up user).

Actually, just for the sake of completeness: Dial-up connections use a
on-the-fly compression known as V.42bis. Using this method, data is
compressed on it's way over the phone line.

Your suggestion may still be wise, I just wanted to point out that adding
gzip compression to Squid will probably not make much of a difference to
dial-up users, as their data is already being compressed when it passes
through the bottleneck (=phone line).

Greetings
Nils

Nils Holland
Ti Systems - FreeBSD in Tiddische, Germany
http://www.tisys.org * nils@tisys.org
Received on Thu Oct 18 2001 - 09:56:56 MDT