Gzip
- Short for GNU zip, Gzip as defined in RFC 1952 is a compress software program often used in Linux that was developed by Jean-Loup Gaily and Mark Alder and released on October 31, 1992. See the gzip page for further details about the command line command. Files that have been compressed with gzip will end with .gz.
- Abbreviation used for gratz.
- When referring to HTTP and content-encoding, HTTP/1.1 and RFC 2616
introduced gzip as a way for a web server
to compress content before sending it to the visitor. Using gzip, makes loading
a page faster because of the smaller size and can also reduce overall bandwidth
costs.
For example, this web page is 7.65 KB in size and the gzipped version of this page is 2.47 KB, which is a data savings of 67.71%. If you took this example, multiplied it by hundreds-of-thousands of pages, you can easily see how this one change can help. This example is also just the .htm file and does not include the .CSS files associated with it, which can also be gzipped.
- How do I extract or uncompress a compressed file?
- How can I check my web page for errors and check for gzip compression?
Also see: Compress, GNU, HTTP, Tarball