Data compression to reduce network bandwidth usage

Question

Hello,

suppose that I've a huge amount of data (>KB/MB) to transfer from an ajax request (JS) to a webpage (PHP), is it usefull to deflate data (by JS scripting) before send it to server and inflate it in my Webpage or the Apache module (Content-Encoding:gzip) do it by itself?

Thanks.

Answer 1

stick with gzip, it it transparent to you and will give you decent compression ratios.

one could argue that it will give you a better ratio for the amount of work you put in setting it up, then writing your own proprietary compressor that will complicated things and cause bugs.

Answer 2

Content Compression offered by apache will only compress data sent from server to client.

For you to compress data that you are sending to the server would involve a lot of effort which i am not sure will be worth the effort.

you could try using a js data zip api like http://jszip.stuartk.co.uk/