AtomicInternet Archived News

Yes, I know it's probably an obvious thing but I never thought to research it thoroughly. HTTP Compression is supported in both HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 protocols. Almost every browser on the planet (except maybe my palm pilot) supports one or both of these protocols which means they all support compression. The obvious advantage being less bandwidth usage with a tradeoff of CPU usage (I have plenty to spare). I'm sure 90% of the websites in the world use compression but I never knew how easy it was to enable it. In IIS, you right-click on your "Web Sites" folder in IIS, click PROPERTIES, then click the Service tab and voila! Now this page you are looking at only requires a transfer of 63,123 bytes instead of the 86,216 to get to you. In my case I get a 20k savings because I spew out untold amounts of HTML on this page to limit how many image files I need to send. You won't be nearly as cool as me (never as cool) if your site is primarily large images. You need a fancier compression tool than what comes with IIS if you want that level of bandwidth stinginess. Here's an informative blog on the topic.