HTTP compression generally uses Gzip compression to accelerate the delivery and display of Web pages, and reduce network traffic.

Articles

HTTP Compression Speeds up the Web

We compress images routinely, why not HTML? Why indeed. Learn how you can speed up your site with this overview of HTTP compression. By Peter Cranstone, Kevin Kiley, and Andy King for WebReference.com.

HTTP Performance Overview

W3C's page devoted to information about how to improve HTTP/1.1 performance. Most of the results are derived from experiences with Jigsaw, Apache and the libwww implementations of HTTP/1.1.

Maximizing IIS Performance

To truly maximize the performance of your Web site, you must consider many separate issues. This article is a collection of recommended performance articles that discuss tuning your IIS Web server, ASP performance, optimizing scripting languages, optimizing access to your data, optimizing client-side performance, and cache use. Includes HTTP compression article. From Microsoft's Dan Evers.

Potential benefits of delta encoding and data compression for HTTP (1997)

Corrected version of a paper appearing in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM '97 on the benefits of delta encoding and compression in HTTP. Numerous citations for further reading.

Use HTTP Compression

A brief introduction to HTTP compression and its benefits. Using HTTP compression to compress your textual content speed downloads and save bandwidth.

HTTP/HTML Compression

AppCelera

Packeteer's Internet Content Accelerator incorporates technology from Workfire to compress HTTP data coming from your server. A caching acceleration server with built-in compression, AppCelera is easy to install, requires no source code installation (embedded in chip/box), and no client is necessary, but has a large server footprint. From Packeteer.

Boostweb Optimizer

Acceleration proxy that compresses HTML and images to speed page display and reduce network traffic. Provides caching and compression with no client required, has a large server footprint.

HTTP compression: Apache Gzip Module from Mozilla

If you can find it, provides HTML compression on the server, not updated since 1998 however. Apparently never finished and there's nothing to download.

HTTP Performance Overview

Papers and tools on ways to improve HTTP 1.1's performance. From the W3C.

Remote Communications

Offers free and retail content acceleration products for Web and mobile applications. RCTPD Web Accelerator is fast (1000 TPS on PII 300) with a small footprint (less then 100K). Binaries available for Windows, Linux, Solaris. Also offers Mod_gzip module free for Apache 1.3.x with full source code. Acquired by Hyperspace Communications.

Vigos AG

Offers payware mod_gzip Apache module.

Web Warper

Offers GZip compression-based products to speed Web page display. Includes unique dynamic compression free service that compresses pages viewed on the fly (including all links), and WebWarper Pro, a server-based version. From SIAMS AlgART Laboratory.

Wwwhoosh

Acceleration proxy in browser, requires client. Supports deflate, not the full content encoding standard.

Browser Accelerators

From Google'd Open Directory. Caches in the background. Does not reduce the amount of content transmitted.

Comments are welcome