GZIP Compression for Improved Page Loads

All modern browsers support GZIP compression (by sending a header to the server, Accept-Encoding: gzip). Enabling gzip server-side for HTML and XML significantly reduces the footprint of the server response which in turns improves the page load-time (latency). It also saves bandwidth costs. The cycles required to zip the response server-side and unzip it client side, are more than offset by the savings in bytes transmitted. In Tomcat 5.x, this is simply a matter of declaring gzip compression for the connector node in server.xml.