From: "Peter J. Cranstone" <Cranstone@worldnet.att.net>
To: <new-httpd@apache.org>
Subject: RE: HTML \"compressor\"
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 14:29:19 -0600
Message-ID: <NDBBKNDHEKGBJIODKAOGEEMGCCAA.Cranstone@worldnet.att.net>
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Hi Martin,

I don't know of any "Official" Apache module which will handle on-the-fly
compression. In testing we've have had our own problems with mod_negotiation
and content encoding with gzip compression.

However there is a solution which works perfectly well. We are just getting
ready to release the full source code to a new module for Apache. It's is
called HyperSpace(r) RCTP(r) Director.

A couple of things you should know up front.

The license agreement. We are using a new license agreement called NSPL or
No Strings Public License. In essence this software is TOTALLY free and
unencumbered in any way shape or form of copyrights or patents or anything.
Bottom line, take it use, modify it, change it, sell it, do whatever you
want with it... There are NO STRINGS attached.

The module weighs in at roughly 30K and is written in straight ANSII C so
you can port it to any platform and recompile it with any compatible
compiler.

Here's how it works. It sits on Port 80 and examines requests made to the
server from the users browser. If the browser (MSIE 4.x some versions, 5.x
for sure, Netscape 4.51 and 4.5) can support native gzip content encoding
then EVERYTHING gets delivered compressed to the browser. If the user has an
old browser then the compression cycle is ignored and regular HTML is
delivered.

In testing we obtained the following results.

GIF's......additional 5% compression
JPEG's... additional 8% and sometimes higher.
HTML..... 80% and as high as 93%

Server performance.

This is a very personal issue on this forum so I will choose my words
carefully. In our testing we have seen an increase in server performance. As
you know CPU utilization is comprised of many different issues, one of which
is the number of cycles required to transmit the actual data to the user.
Even though we spend cycles to compress (this is minimal because our code is
so small) this is more than compensated by the reduced number of bytes
required for transmission...

We would welcome any feedback in this particular area.

We will post the full source code to this module in the next day or so. We
have tested on Apache and everything is fine, however we are just clearing
up a few last minute issues with the Squid Caching server.

Peter J. Cranstone
Cranstone@RemoteCommunications.com
http://www.remotecommunications.com

-----Original Message-----
From: new-httpd-owner@apache.org [mailto:new-httpd-owner@apache.org]On
Behalf Of Geocrawler.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 1999 1:39 PM
To: new-httpd@apache.org
Subject: HTML \"compressor\"

This message was sent from Geocrawler.com by "Martin Dvorak"
<mdvorak@ninell.cz>
Be sure to reply to that address.

Hi all,

Does anybody know of any Apache module which
could do an HTML "compression" on the fly
(removing unnecessary spaces, new-lines etc.).

I am sorry if this is not the list I should
post this kind of message to. I didn't find
any more suitable list.

Thanks for help.

Martin

Geocrawler.com - The Knowledge Archive