We’ve added the snappy compression algorithm to PHP.
Snappy offers much higher compression/decompression speeds compared to gzip,
at a slight compression ratio cost.
This is taken from the Squash Benchmark, which is a good overview
over various compression algorithms vs various input data.
From the above benchmarks, using the core i-7 machine together with the html source,
gzip and snappy compare as follows:
snappy:
compresses: 207 MB/s
decompresses: at 499 MB/s
compression ratio: 2.08
gzip5:
compresses: 33 MB/s
decompresses: 157 MB/s
compression ratio: 3.07
As you can see the compression speed is 6 times faster and the decompression speed is
about 3 times faster. While the compression ratio is about 30% worse, the page cache
hits and page cache misses will both be significantly faster with snappy as far as
compressing/decompressing is concerned.
The snappy compression is the default preferred compression algorithm in the
CM Cache Redis plugin (see Github). Lesti FPC does not use snappy or any other algorithm
other than gzip.