We have several Web apps with a lot of documents with RichText fields.
Will compressing document data have any impact on performance? Good or bad?
I am aware of storage cost-savings but that’s a secondary parameter right now.
Thanks a lot
Mael
Subject: Compression and performance
My understanding from people who should know, is that most Notes/Domino applications are “I/O bound” – i.e. the bottleneck to their speed is the amount of time they spend reading and writing on disk, or waiting for another thread to be done with the disk so that they can have their turn. If you reduce the amount of data that must be read or written, it’s likely to improve performance, even when you take into account the extra CPU work that must be done to compress and decompress. It does depend on the application and where it’s doing most of its work, but it’s certainly worth experimenting to see what difference it makes.
Of course, data sent to the browser is not compressed; the browser wouldn’t understand what to do with compressed data. This is all internal processing we’re talking about.
There are of course other factors that affect application performance. You may want to read Performance basics for developers (whitepaper) to see whether there are other opportunities for easy speed-ups.
Subject: Many thanks, Andre