How Gzip Trumps Everything
In short, if you try to eliminate redundancy by applying some kind of clever transformation or restructuring your data object before piping it to gzip, you will probably just do a crappy job of reimplementing gzip at the wrong layer of abstraction, and get worse results overall.
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December 26, 2015 9:03 PM
Funnily, the article next to this one in my news feed was about netflix reencoding their entire movie library to save a bit on bandwidth. Obviously, piping the movie to gzip really wouldn't have helped, which kinda refutes your point. Gzip is a very generic algorithm. It will do better than you if you don't want to put an enormous effort into doing better or if your data is the kind that gzip excels at.
