JSF StateSaving and Compression

StateSaving in JSF is the uncle no one wants to talk about. You get a lot of things for 'free' with JSF, but for the most part, these features end up adversely affecting the state size of the view.

JSF has two options for StateSaving: client and server (actually pluggable for anything you want). The basic rule of thumb is if you want to save memory, you go with client state saving-- pushing Object state to the client, encoded in the view. StateSaving server is a bit more performant, but retains stacks of views in the user's HttpSession.

What I want to focus on is client StateSaving. With saving state on the client, you are basically serializing an object graph and outputting it into the page as a Base64 String. Optional features here include encryption and compression. Encryption is only needed in rare cases-- but compression is often enabled. From my own tests, compressing JSF state means a reduction in size by at least a factor of 10 (hmmm... maybe this tells us something ;-).

By default, client state is compressed with normal GZip. I believe MyFaces actually opts out of compression by default, but any of Jason Hunter's old articles on Compression Filters actually tell you that compression is a good thing with network latency. Yes, compression adds processor overhead, but lets see if we can't look at some alternatives to GZip?

Diving through java.util.zip, I know that there are other 'Deflaters' available which have interesting 'types'-- such as Best Performance, Huffman, Best Compression, etc. Let's see how these compare with a grossly large JSF page (basically 100 pages put together in one) and averaged over hundreds of iterations of StateSaving:

Update: I've added Ryan's JMeter results from trying some of these algorithms against the CarDemo app with 50 threads running for 5 minutes at random intervals of 200-300ms.

The different algorithms are listed within the java.util.zip package in the javadocs, but I found the numbers to be pretty interesting. Of course, I'm a compression n00b, so if anyone had any comments on why it would be bad to switch to one of the other algorithms as a set-able option with JSF, please let me know!

I should note too that smaller page sizes, all the algorithms fluxate in timings between runs by quite a bit (5ms > 0ms) which may be attributed purely to GC or the ObjectOutput/InputStream itself.