On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 05:03:03AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Just for kicks, I've added some preliminary, experimental support for gzip encoding of pages that have been saved in the file cache. If $wgUseGzip is not enabled in LocalSettings, it shouldn't have any effect; if it is, it'll make compressed copies of cached files and then serve them if the client claims to accept gzip.
At present this only affects file-cachable pages: so plain current page views by not-logged-in users. Compression is only done when generating the cached file, so it oughtn't to drain CPU resources too much. My informal testing shows the gzipping takes about 2-3 ms, which is much shorter than most of the page generation steps. (Though it will eat up some additional disk space, as both uncompressed and compressed copies are kept on disk.)
One of the nice things about gzip is that decompression is much much cheaper than compression. It might almost make sense to just compress everything and then decompress on the fly if you need it.