whatsmyip.org — Digg.com is not gzipped. Page Size: 41 K, Size if Gzipped: 9 K, Potential Savings: 78.05% !!! That's a potential bandwidth saving for Digg as well as the end-user. Technically, any web app (Windows or Linux) can be compressed for HTTP. Vote and show your interest in Digg being Gzipped for more efficiency.
Feb 19, 2007 View in Crawl 4
nwilyFeb 19, 2007
@fk2 Obviously you are correct, they still need to be downloaded. But if you're a regular digg user, and lets say you have 10-20 page view a day, digg is still only serving those .js files once. So if you want to figure digg's real saving's for writing their own JS library, here's the formula: Size of Javascript included/(number of page views it's cached for).So let's say it's cached for 10 page views. That means they are only serving 27k of JS per page load. Again, more than you'd like, but not the worst I've seen. The question is this: is it still financially a good move to dedicate a team of JS people to handle your personal library, or save XX dollars a year by using existing libraries and spending the extra money on bandwidth. I'd be surprised if someone their hasn't don the math.
Closed AccountFeb 19, 2007
A team of JS people? The stuff it does is could be rewritten in an afternoon or a day at most by a single person good at JS. For a project I've got on I emulated certain aspects of digg's functionality (sliding in / out, voting, adjusting the score + adding new comments via JS) for a total of 8kb.Did you factor in the chicklets? They would add millions (maybe 10's of) of downloads to those files. A quarter meg x millions is a hell of a lot of gigabytes a day.Th JS I wrote, with bloated commenting (it may not make much sense out of context):<a class="user" href="http://pastebin.com/884875">http://pastebin.com/884875</a>
mrdoFeb 20, 2007
No, you make a browser match directive that will make it server regular pages to those browsers.
ebob9Feb 20, 2007
There are Network Hardware vendors that make devices offload devices specifically to Gzip dynamic content, if people don't want to bother doing it themselves (or don't want to deal with the server CPU utilization).<a class="user" href="http://www.f5demo.com/compression/">http://www.f5demo.com/compression/</a><a class="user" href="http://www.radware.com/content/products/appxcel/compression/">http://www.radware.com/content/products/appxcel/compression/</a>Just to name a couple.
nwilyFeb 20, 2007
@fkr2 I'm not sure one person could do it in an afternoon. I'm sure you or I could, and make it work on our browser, but thats not how it is. Most places I've worked, JS has to be designed to work with 3 or 4 major browsers, and 2 or 3 versions of each browser. The compatibility testing alone can take you most of an afternoon. And that's not even getting into the JS/CSS interplay issues.Again, I agree, the bandwidth savings are significant, and for most people it would be worth it. But you have limited time/people, you have to pick your battles. I'd be surprised if it wasn't on their "todo" list (or more likely, figure out if this is a good use of time), but I'm not at all surprised they haven't done it.
bamborzledFeb 20, 2007
@hufman It's called the subjunctive mood.<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood#The_subjunctive_in_English">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood#The_subjunctive_in_English</a>
zlintuxFeb 20, 2007
bah, was beaten to it...
l008comMar 3, 2007
Hi GuysI am the creator of www.whatsmyip.org and all of its tools. Heres some more information for you. This site (digg.com) does appear to be compressed already. My tool doesn't say it is compressed because for some very odd reason, this server doesn't seem to be sending out the "Content-Encoding:" header letting me know what kind of data it is sending me. I'm not sure how the browsers figure this out. Also as far as GZIPing in general, it is a great way to save bandwidth. However it does not run at the expense of CPU. Yes the CPU does have to compress each page, but because each connection is so much shorter now, most servers are actually going to see a significant DROP in CPU usage in addition to the drop in bandwidth. GZIP really is a great thing and really every site should use it. So if anyone knows a little more about this than I do, feel free to let me know how this particular server is letting browsers know it's content is GZip'ed.