HTTP header compression

http http-headers http-compression
Potatoswatter picture Potatoswatter · Mar 17, 2011 · Viewed 7.1k times · Source

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?

Answer

typo.pl picture typo.pl · Mar 17, 2011

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.

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