Dieter Maurer wrote:
Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote at 2006-4-10 13:14 +0100:
.... For example, I downloaded the www.plone.org home page and it was 47704 bytes. I removed all whitespace from the beginning and end of lines, and then removed blank lines, and it was down to 35087 bytes - that's a more than 25% saving, and the output renders exactly the same in web browsers.
A much more efficient way is to activate "gzip" compression for your pages. It not only handles white space efficiently (and correct for e.g. pages with "pre" tags or similar CSS directives) it also compresses other text. You not only gain 25 % but about 70 % (in the size of requests).
gzip will add enormous processing overhead to the server. Striping spaces will add negligible overhead, likely less overhead than it saves.
You will not save RAM on the server side (of course), but hopefully (and very likely) the scripts are not the major user of RAM on your site.
I have written TAL that produces very large dumps of XML data in the past, even whole sites. It's a really nice way to dump data from a database (SQL or Zope DB), but Zope has to build the whole output in RAM before sending any of it, so it can cause the site to crash. I would hope in this kind of case that the TAL is the major user of RAM on the site, so any saving would be really good, but it all cases (except <pre> tags, which I would never use) it seems like a possibly significant gain. Robert Munro