How can I speed up HTTP downloads for my website
Fast download time is essential for today's websites. Most solutions, like load-balancers, focus on scaling to thousands of clients, by spreading the load among multiple webservers. However, these solutions do not help reduce the download time for individual requests.
ViCompress is a free and open-source HTTP compression and caching proxy server. ViCompress reduces download time by gzip compressing text pages before sending them on the client. This results in faster download times, especially over slow connections, such as mobile device connections. ViCompress can reduce a 100 KB HTML page to 20 KB, cutting the download time by 80%.Fast download time is essential for today's websites. Most solutions, like load-balancers, focus on scaling to thousands of clients, by spreading the load among multiple webservers. However, these solutions do not help reduce the download time for individual requests.
ViCompress works with existing web servers and web browsers. All modern browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) recognize gzip-encoded data, and will automatically decompress the data on the fly. Also, ViCompress can compress both static and dynamic web pages, including Apache/PHP, Microsoft ASP pages, Perl CGI scripts, and others.
ViCompress supports the following features:
- In-Memory compression
- In-Memory caching
- Load Balancing and Failover
- DNS lookup caching
- Persistent connections (client and server)
- Full HTTP/1.1 support, including chunked-encoding
- Apache/Squid Log files
- HTML Reports with Compression/Caching Statistics
- Handles thousands of simultaneous clients
- Scales to multiple processors
- Available for both Microsoft Windows and Linux
- Free and open source
See the resources box to the right for downloading the ViCompress source code, pre-compiled binaries, and manual. The Sample Reports link shows a sample HTML report generated by ViCompress, giving the caching and compression statistics in bar chart format.
