Effective Compression for the Web:
Exploiting Document Linkages
Raymond Wan
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering,
The University of Melbourne,
Victoria 3010, Australia.
Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering,
The University of Melbourne,
Victoria 3010, Australia.
Status
Proc. 12th Australasian Datacase Conference, Gold Coast, Australia,
February 2001, 68-75.
Abstract
Providing the infrastructure that supports the World-Wide
Web is
expensive.
The costs incurred in setting up a web site include those associated
with the content being served; those associated with the hardware
necessary to support the site; and the network costs incurred in
transmitting that content to the end consumers.
In this work we examine mechanisms for compressing web content so as
to reduce the third of these three costs, and describe a
scheme that exploits the known connectivities between web pages to
derive improved transmission cost
savings compared to the obvious approach of
simply compressing each page on the site using a standard tool such
as GZip.
Experiments on a medium-sized web site confirm our claims that
considerable reductions in network bandwidth requirements can be
achieved.