Can you use gzip over SSL? And Connection: Keep-Alive headers

Question

I\'m evaluating the front end performance of a secure (SSL) web app here at work and I\'m wondering if it\'s possible to compress text files (html/css/javascript) over SSL.

Answer 1

To your first question: SSL is working on a different layer than compression. In a sense these two are features of a web server that can work together and not overlap. Yes, by enabling compression you'll use more CPU on your server but have less of outgoing traffic. So it's more of a tradeoff.

To your second question: Keep-Alive behavior is really dependent on HTTP version. You could move your static content to a non-ssl server (may include images, movies, audio, etc)