UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting Compression, is it good or bad?

I'm trying to find some info about zlib/gzip compression.

Enabling compression is *really* speeding up ubb page load times. What kind of overhead does enabling compression with ubbthreads cause or does it make the connections actually speed up and can handle more hits in less time due to quicker sending? and what kind of problems might end users have if it's enabled?

Thanks

I've been using zlib/gzip compression for a long time, without any server problems or complaints by users.

Technically, it forces the server to do a bit more work, and if your site gets a very large number of hits, it might overtax the CPU.

If you have a dedicated server, you could monitor the loading with and without compression, and see if there's any significant difference. If you have an account on a shared server, and you're concerned about load, you could ask your web host about it.

I have always run with compression on, and I'm on a dedicated server. I think for the most part, you would be better off with it on. Once you started getting 100+ people online at a time, you may want to test it with or without compression and see what kind of load differences you have. But I think on most higher end hardware it would be good to have on.

But, you do raise a good question, as I haven't tested it with a higher number of users. I may try to tests on my site during peak times next week, just to get a better idea at the kind of differences one can expect.

We're taking 400-600 people mostly, right now. It seems with compression =on= that load times are a bit faster...

What is the good thing about having compression on?

Does it matter that we only have 512MB ram?

Thanks

Well, like you said, load times will be faster for users. But.. the drawback is the CPU overhead with turning on compression. So you should monitor the actual server loads, as that is what compression will affect most. So it is a a give or take, and will depend on your server hardware. If your server is seeing high loads with gzip on.. you may want to turn it off, to sacrifice slightly longer user load times to bring the load of your server down.

THere are no set rules to this, as it all depends on so many individual factors and prefrences