Gzip Encoding of Web Pages?

Both Brendan Quinn and msim were curious about the ability to send gzip-encoded Web pages. Brendan asks: "It's possible to make Apache detect the "Accept-encoding: gzip" field sent by NS 4.7+, IE 4+ and Lynx, and send a gzip-encoded page, thus saving lots of bandwidth all over the place. So why don't people do it? Here is a module written by the Mozilla guys a couple of years ago that -almost- does what I want, and I could change it pretty easily... but I thought someone else would have done it by now? eXcite do it, does anyone know of any other large-scale sites that use gzip encoding?"

"If you have LWP installed, you can check with:

GET -p '<my proxy>' -H 'Accept-encoding: gzip' -e http://www.site.com/ | less

Try that with 'www.excite.com' and you'll get binary (gzipped) data. That's what I want to do."

Comments

Re:Why do it at all?

[AT]

The page quoted in the article shows its a pretty big win for some "typical use" sites on slower modems.

Incidentally, no extra load would be neccessary on the server for static content if it was pre-compressed.