Recent Deflate Compression Results
Deflate is clearly better than modem compression
But also helps significantly on a LAN
- More than one might naively expect
- Since more of the first HTML page arrives in the first, compressed packet, client is more likely to be able to ask for more embedded objects sooner, filling its first request buffer sooner, causing it to be flushed to the server sooner
- HTTP/1.1, with pipelining, with HTML compression beats HTTP/1.0 performance for first time retrieval test by a factor of 2 (on a LAN)
This suggests that an explicit flush after the first buffer of compressed HTML might be a good strategy
- Haven’t tried this yet
- Might cost extra packets (how significant??)