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A comment on Why you should always use gzip instead of deflate compression. Parent comment

Re:Why you should always use gzip instead of deflate compres... by rmc on Sunday March 25, 2012 @05:49PM (#3753954)
The largest assets will be already compressed (eg images and/or video). Http compression is only really benefiting for textual content. Gzip gives you a massive space saving over non compressed for textual data, but after that you're in diminishing returns. Although bzip2 is better than gzip, its not a lot better.
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Re:Why you should always use gzip instead of deflate compres... by burstlag on Wednesday March 28, 2012 @03:09PM (#3767803)
bzip2 compresses significantly better than gzip (I typically see a delta of between 10% and 30% in filesize) but it comes at a significant cost: compressing/decompressing the same file generally takes many times longer. xz compresses even better but takes even longer.

Also, some web servers (or at least Apache) will serve gzipped static content automagically if it finds a matching gzipped file. For example, if you have /var/www/html/foobar.css.gz, it will serve the contents of that file directly when the client requests http://example.com/foobar.css. So if you're running a stock Apache configuration, there's no reason not to just run gzip on all of your static assets and get lower bandwidth bills right away.

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