Speed demon
 
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In realty the key to value is always characterized as "location, location, location. " On the Web location also matters but there's something that is arguably just as important: speed, speed, speed.
No matter how cool your domain name is, no matter how snazzy your graphics are and snappy your text is, if the content trickles down molasses-like to the user, you are nowhere baby. Without speed your Web site is as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland: "There's no there, there. "
(Digression: In one of the Austin Powers movies there's a scene where Powers walks into a party, turns to a man standing by the door and says "There you are baby! " The man, looking puzzled, replies "Sorry, do I know you? " to which Powers replies "No! But *there* you are baby! ")
So, today we have a performance fix for you that is relatively simple, a really cool piece of technology and very cheap to deploy. The fix is called WebWarper Site Optimizer from Intellect Reconstruction Informational Technologies, part of the Ural State Technical University, a Russian educational establishment.
The idea behind WebWarper is simple and based on the fact that 4.0+ Web browsers understand that on receipt of compressed (GZIP'ed) content they should decompress it and then treat that as normally retrieved content. GZIP'ing results in content that is typically two to eight times smaller than the original uncompressed content (bigger pages compress better than small pages).
Now you could just compress your Web pages but it would be a painful management problem. Much easier to use WebWarper which not only compresses using GZIP but also removes extraneous white space and comments (adding about another 5% to 25% compression). This latter feature also means that you can add any amount of comments and notations to aid maintenance of your HTML pages and there's no download overhead.
WebWarper processes Web pages on demand and the developers claim the utility can compress at a rate of up to 500K bit/sec. In addition, static pages can be cached.
WebWarper requires Perl on the server and is supported on Apache and Microsoft IIS under Unix, Linux and Windows NT and 2000. There's quite a bit of detail about the WebWarper technology on the company's site and they also offer a version called WebWarper JS that uses client side JavaScript to unpack precompressed static content, useful for sites that don't want to (or can't) run the server scripts.
WebWarper Site Optimizer is licensed at three levels: $1,500 for a multihost license, $99 for single Web site license and $20 for the WebWarper JS license. There's also a free version and a hosted version - both advertising supported. Definitely worth checking out.
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Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World.
Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. Gibbs is also co-conspirator of the Vitally Important Information Web site.
Gibbs can be contacted at webapps@gibbs.com. Press releases to pr@gibbs.com.
