Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Optimizing Web Servers for Wireless
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 10:30 AM
"So you’ve got a website and you are interested in providing content for wireless devices? Did you know that HTML can be compressed before it is sent to a Pocket PC, Handheld PC or Tablet PC? Well you website can be faster for free! Microsoft has implemented the HTML 1.1 protocol including support for gzip and deflate formats in the Pocket PC 2000 and 2002, Handheld PC 2000 and desktop web browsers like Internet Explorer 4 or later. Other web browsers like Netscape Navigator 4 or later and Lynx 2.6 or later also support HTML compression. The Pocket PC and Handheld PC web browsers reports "ACCEPT_ENCODING: gzip, deflate" as does most modern browsers. So if you implement HTML compression, your website HTML will be compressed approximately 50% or more!"
If you're the webmaster of a site, you'll want to read this article. We've been discussing this ourselves, and will likely do a trial implementation. Our phpBB forums already have gzip enabled, but our home page and other non-forum pages do not. Especially on our mobile page, this might cut down the load time. We don't have a lot of CPU cycles to spare right now (our server goes down several times a day), but I've been discussing this with some other site owners and the CPU savings from dishing up smaller overall pages should meet or exceed the CPU hit from enabling GZIP.
If you're the webmaster of a site, you'll want to read this article. We've been discussing this ourselves, and will likely do a trial implementation. Our phpBB forums already have gzip enabled, but our home page and other non-forum pages do not. Especially on our mobile page, this might cut down the load time. We don't have a lot of CPU cycles to spare right now (our server goes down several times a day), but I've been discussing this with some other site owners and the CPU savings from dishing up smaller overall pages should meet or exceed the CPU hit from enabling GZIP.
