Unveiling the performance impact of lossless compression to web page content delivery

Abstract

User's perceived latency for web content retrieval is always a big concern to web users and content delivery and distribution network service providers. To improve the performance of web content retrieval, researchers are actively looking into mechanisms which accelerate the downloading process of retrieval objects and pages as the performance of caching-based mechanisms is limited. Compression is one important mechanism among these mechanisms. In this paper, we report our comprehensive study on the effect and implication of compression in web content delivery. Our results show that pre-compression almost always performs better than real-time compression because it reduces not only the retrieval latency of COs, but also the DT times of EOs in a page. © Springer-Verlag 2004.