Feed Compression, Revisited

Kevin Burton, in a post picked up by SlashDot, was wondering about the number of feeds that use gzip compression. I have been tracking this for a while, and the answer is “not nearly enough.” Kevin guessed that 1/3 of the feeds might be doing this, and he’s way too optimistic.

Out of 423,105 feeds in the Syndic8 database, just 12,106 respond with gzip compressed data when asked to do so. The space reduction is pretty remarkable, as shown by this chart:

As you can see, most feeds compress down to 1/3 of their original size, or less.

The last time I wrote about this I was flooded with requests for more information on how to enable gzip compression. I wrote about this in my posting titled Enabling mod_gzip.