Speed Up your web sites with HTTP Compression

Need of HTTP Compression:

1. Increase the speed of web page retrieval (effectively the speed of your web site).
2. Reduce the bandwidth utilization.

How to achieve all these??

You can achieve the above goal by decreasing the size of your HTML pages, JS, CSS which can be done be a technique known as HTTP Compression.

Idea behind HTTP Compression:

The idea is to compress data being sent out from your Web server, and have the browser decompress this data on the fly, thus reducing the amount of data sent and increasing the page display speed. There are two ways to compress data coming from a Web server, dynamically, and pre-compressed. Dynamic Content Acceleration compresses the data transmission data on the fly (useful for e-commerce apps, database-driven sites, etc.). Pre-compressed text based data is generated beforehand and stored on the server (.html.gz Files etc). [source:]

The compression techniques (algorithm) used can be
1. GZIP
2. Deflate Compression

I found a very useful link with details of the software used for HTTP compression

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/18/