Re: HTTP serving compressed content (was Re: Perl "competitor" Curl raises $52M)

From: Andy Armstrong (andy@tagish.com)
Date: Thu Mar 15 2001 - 15:38:53 PST


Gordon Mohr wrote:
[snip]
> That suggests to me that either (1) it's so transparent it's easy
> to miss; or (2) it doesn't save enough in bandwidth costs to be
> worth the trouble.

It's generally completely transparent and pretty effective. In our tests
we've seen typical compression ratios of 6:1 on typical HTML content.
Last time I checked something over 90% of browsers hitting our sites
were able to handle GZIP compressed content, and those that can't
degrade gracefully.

> If (2), Curl's business case is really in trouble, because if
> people can't be convinced to use free off-the-shelf compression
> to save on bandwidth, why would they spend for a whole new
> active-content system to save on bandwidth?

It's seems like a pretty mad business model anyway.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, Tagish



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