9 posts tagged “gzip”
2026
I ran into trouble deploying a new feature using SSE to a production Datasette instance, and it turned out that instance was using datasette-gzip which uses asgi-gzip which was incorrectly compressing event/text-stream responses.
asgi-gzip was extracted from Starlette, and has a GitHub Actions scheduled workflow to check Starlette for updates that need to be ported to the library... but that action had stopped running and hence had missed Starlette's own fix for this issue.
I ran the workflow and integrated the new fix, and now datasette-gzip and asgi-gzip both correctly handle text/event-stream in SSE responses.
2022
Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes
I figured out a GitHub Actions pattern to keep track of a file published somewhere on the internet and automatically open a new repository issue any time the contents of that file changes.
[... 1,211 words]Weeknotes: Parallel SQL queries for Datasette, plus some middleware tricks
A promising new performance optimization for Datasette, plus new datasette-gzip and datasette-total-page-time plugins.
2017
gzthermal (via) “pseudo thermal view of Gzip/Deflate compression efficiency”—neat tool for visualizing gzip compressed data and understanding exactly how run-length encoding and back references apply to a gzipped file.
Of SVG, Minification and Gzip. Delightfully nerdy exploration of tricks you can use to hand-optimize your SVG in order to maximize gzip compression. Premature optimization may be the root of all evil but this is still a great way to learn about how gzip actually works.
2010
gzip support for Amazon Web Services CloudFront. This would have saved me a bunch of work a few weeks ago. CloudFront can now be pointed at your own web server rather than S3, and you can ask it to forward on the Accept-Encoding header and cache multiple content versions based on the result.
Velocity: Forcing Gzip Compression. Almost every browser supports gzip these days, but 15% of web requests have had their Accept-Encoding header stripped or mangled, generally due to poorly implemented proxies or anti-virus software. Steve Souders passes on a trick used by Google Search, where an iframe is used to test the browser’s gzip support and set a cookie to force gzipping of future pages.
PNGStore—Embedding compressed CSS & JavaScript in PNGs. Cal did some further analysis on the CSS/JS to PNG compression trick (including producing some interesting images of jQuery compressed using different image packing techniques) and found it to be slightly less effective than regular GZipping.
2009
Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step. Paul promotes gzip encoding using nginx as a proxy, and mentions that FriendFeed use a “custom, epoll-based python server” as their application server. Does that mean that they’re serving their real-time comet feeds directly from Python?