In my regular job I'm responsible for a website that's accessed by people all over the world (and yes..I realize that applies to OpenNTF too!). We did some analysis to measure response time and availability of the site around the world. Our servers are in US and we've seen consistenty that performance in Asia Pacific region is almost 3 to 5 times slower than US. One of the solutions recommended was to compress some of the content using gzip compression. For those that are not familiar with it, you can learn more about it on http://www.http-compression.com but in short, here's the definition from their website:

"According to RFC 2616, Internet HTTP Compression is a method to send, from the Web server, an HTTP response message in compressed format to a requesting Web browser. This technology assumes that the Web server is capable of encoding the outbound content and the Web browser is capable of (automatically) decoding the received content. HTTP Compression saves transfer data volume and speeds ups Web page load time. "

As some of you may know, Domino 7 has this capability, but its only exposed in Domino Web Access There have been a few posts/complaints about the limited capability and there is an undocumented way to enable gzip for all NSFs posted by Manfred Dillman which you can use at your own risk. There are of course numerous products available that act as proxies in front of your web server and do the compression and on OpenNTF we did try Web Booster from Puakma. Compression can make a significant difference in performance of the website but it seems there are some side effects which may be more trouble than its worth. I'm wondering if others have experienced similar problems with performance in different countries and also how the performance of OpenNTF is in other countries in Asia/Pacific.

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