Domino 8.5, GZIP, and EXT

Domino 8.5 will support serving of gzip files by default. This is great news! I can finally stop using hacks to get Domino to use gzip files, and writing @if statements to check for browser compatibility.

This greatly affects the first page load time.

Here is an example of the top three files for extnd gzipped versus unzipped.
434 KB savings!!!



Details from the 8.5 reviewers guide

2.8 GNU zip (gzip) files
The Domino Web server can serve files compressed by gzip (GNU zip). This feature is on by default, but you must add the compressed file to the appropriate server directory, and certain restrictions apply, as listed below.
The Domino Web Server serves files compressed by gzip (GNU zip), under the following conditions:
• The Notes.ini file does not contain the following setting: HTTPDisablePreCompressedGzipFiles=1.

• The name of the compressed file is the name of the original file with an additional extension of .gz. For example, the gzip counterpart of c:\notes\data\domino\html\foo.html is c:\notes\data\domino\html\foo.html.gz. (A browser sees this file as http://servername/foo.html.)

• The original file is present in the same directory as the gzip file. The original file is served if it is newer than the gzip file or compression is disabled.

• The browser or other client sends the request header Accept-Encoding: gzip (the default for most browsers).

• The MIME Content-type of the file matches text/* (all subtypes of type text) or application/* (all subtypes of type application). The server does not support sending a range of bytes for a file that has a gzip counterpart. The server does not send "Accept-Ranges: bytes" in the HTTP header and sends the entire compressed file.




Does anyone know of any better way to make these files smaller?