June 2009
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
7h 3m
English
Content preview from Even Faster Web SitesBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 9. Going Beyond Gzipping
Besides proper configuration of HTTP caching headers, enabling gzip compression is typically the most important technique for speeding up your web page. A chapter was devoted to compression in Steve Souders’ first book, High Performance Web Sites. Now that all browsers support gzip and all responsible web developers have enabled gzipping, that chapter is closed, right? Not quite.
Even if you have enabled gzipping, there is a good chance that a small but significant portion of visitors to your site are not receiving compressed responses. The exact percentage varies greatly across different demographics and geographies, but a large web site in the United States should expect that roughly 15% of visitors don’t indicate gzip compression support. This chapter explains why the percentage is higher than expected, how that affects performance, and what developers can do about it.
Why Does This Matter?
With such a small percentage, you might ask, “What’s the big deal?” Let’s take a look at what happens to 10 popular web sites when gzipping is disabled.
In this experiment, the page load time[41] for 10 popular web sites was measured by loading each web site 100 times in Internet Explorer 7.0 on Windows XP Pro. The cache remained primed between iterations to better represent the typical experience. All requests traveled through a proxy (Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler[42]) on the same machine. In the control group the proxy did nothing, but in the experimental ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.