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Optimized Compression Libraries

Optimized Compression Libraries

5
posts
2012–2015

Cloudflare's Railgun technology, a protocol for significantly faster and less bandwidth-intensive dynamic content delivery, has seen its version 3.3.3 battle-tested on high-traffic sites and released with RPMs for popular Linux and BSD variants, as well as an AMI for AWS. Additionally, a majority of leading hosting providers have integrated Railgun support, allowing users to enable it with a single click. This post details Luxury Link's experience using Railgun, observing significant reductions in HTML size and round-trip times. The article also discusses the limitations of generic compression like gzip and explores advanced techniques like Shared Dictionary Compression (SDCH) and Edge Side Includes (ESI) for further optimization of dynamically generated web content.

2015

Fighting Cancer: The Unexpected Benefit Of Open Sourcing Our Code

7/8/2015

This post details Cloudflare's optimized fork of the zlib compression library, highlighting specific technical improvements such as using uint64_t, an iSCSI CRC32 hash function, a longer match search window, SIMD instructions for window rolling, and the PLCMULQDQ instruction for CRC32 checksums. It also presents comprehensive benchmarks comparing the Cloudflare fork against the original zlib and Intel's optimized version across various datasets, demonstrating significant performance advantages.

2014

Welcome 1&1 Internet, CloudFlare’s Newest Optimized Partner!

1/6/2014

This post announces the partnership with 1&1 Internet, making Cloudflare's Railgun technology available to their 12 million customers. It explains the technical challenge of offering Railgun to a broad audience and how the 'Optimized Partner' program, using hosting providers as aggregation points, solves this by allowing one or more Railgun servers to accelerate performance for multiple websites. This makes a technology that previously cost thousands of dollars per month available at no cost to 1&1 customers.

2013

Railgun Gives our Ecommerce Sites the Edge

7/15/2013

This post details Luxury Link's experience using Cloudflare's Railgun technology. They observed a 40% reduction in HTML load time from their Los Angeles-hosted home page when accessed from the US East Coast, and a 2x speedup from London. Crucially, Railgun dramatically reduced outbound bandwidth consumption from their origin servers, flattening traffic peaks from a 10:1 inbound to outbound ratio to a 1:1 ratio during peak times, and from 5:1 to 3:1 during off-peak times. This was attributed to Railgun's delta compression algorithm, which effectively sends only the differences between uncached HTML documents.

CloudFlare's Railgun: Easier Than Ever

2/26/2013

This post announces the release of Railgun version 3.3.3, including RPMs for various Linux and BSD distributions and an upcoming AMI for AWS. It also highlights the integration of Railgun with over 30 hosting providers, enabling one-click activation for users.

2012

Efficiently compressing dynamically generated web content

12/6/2012

This post introduces the concept of using external dictionaries for compression, going beyond generic methods like gzip. It details two proposals, SDCH and ESI, and discusses their potential and challenges. The article highlights how these techniques can significantly reduce the size of dynamically generated HTML content by referencing common 'blocks' of data, thereby minimizing the impact of latency. It also mentions Cloudflare's own Railgun technology as a solution for this problem.