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WebWarper / Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.) / Usage of WebWarper

I believe the traffic is compressed by 30-50%, not in 3 times

First of all, the situation is possible when there is no traffic compression: see the question "Does WebWarper really compress my traffic?"

If compression works successfully, the real saving depends on the site type. Only textual part of the traffic (HTML code and scripts) is compressed. The graphics, video and other non-textual data are not compressed. So, if you visit a site to look movies (several megabytes), WebWarper cannot save even 1% of the traffic.

Sites, containing a lot of graphics, as photo galleries, are also compressed low. For example, http://www.aguntherphotography.com/ site consists of high quality photos mainly. Here the textual data are 10-30% only. As a result, the saving, provided by WebWarper, does not exceed 5-20%.

It does not mean that the sites, containing large literary texts, are best compressed (for example, when a large story or novel is published at a single page). Compression rarely exceeds 2 times for such sites.

Our "1.5-3 times" numbers relate to most typical, popular sites: news, forums, corporate sites, different directories, references, web portals. As a rule, a typical web page contains a lot of HTML code and JavaScript, necessary for the web desing. This is textual data, and only a part of it, usually less than a half, is visible to a visitor as text. Invisible service HTML code, due to the nature of gzip algorithm, is compressed very fine, much better than texts in human language. On an average, the overall saving of textual traffic varies from 3 to 5 times, according to our statistics.

The graphics on sites reduces this number. Site developers try not to misuse graphics while creation of sites that do not specially figured on the graphic content, as photo galleries. The amount of graphics on sites does not exceed 50% usualy. So, the overall traffic saving is really about 1.5-3 times, or up to 3-4 times on graphics-pure sites (as forums or directories of resources).

Remind that WebWarper super dense mode allows to compress the traffic almost always and very good, up to 10 times and more.

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