Menu
HTTP headers aren't very efficient. Dozens of bytes more than necessary are used between the minimal method and response headers.
Has there been any proposal to standardize a binary or compressed format for HTTP?
Is there a similar standard besides HTTP which is better suited to interactive mobile applications?
692
This results in a unique Gzip data format, also named Gzip, which wraps DEFLATE compressed data with a checksum and header. Due to early problems with DEFLATE, some users prefer to only use Gzip. Typically, HTTP headers are not compressed, as HTTP content-encoding based compression applies to the response body only.
HTTP compression allows content to be compressed on the server before transmission to the client. For resources such as text this can significantly reduce the size of the response message, leading to reduced bandwidth requirements and download times.
Header compression is a mechanism that compresses the header in a data packet before the packet is transmitted. Header compression reduces network overhead and speeds up the transmission of packets. Header compression also reduces the amount of bandwidth consumed when the packets are transmitted.
HTTP data is compressed before it is sent from the server: compliant browsers will announce what methods are supported to the server before downloading the correct format; browsers that do not support compliant compression method will download uncompressed data.
As referenced in Stackoverflow - How to compress HTTP response headers?:
See Google's SPDY research project: Google's SPDY research project
From SPDY whitepaper:
The role of header compression
Header compression resulted in an ~88% reduction in the size of request headers and an ~85% reduction in the size of response headers. On the lower-bandwidth DSL link, in which the upload link is only 375 Kbps, request header compression in particular, led to significant page load time improvements for certain sites (i.e. those that issued large number of resource requests). We found a reduction of 45 - 1142 ms in page load time simply due to header compression.
152
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
