Abstract
Due to the exponential growth of the web and the Internet, content delivery
performance is a dominant theme in Internet processes development. This thesis
investigates the practices and research on the topic of web performance, and focuses on
data size reduction by changing JPEG image compression levels. Compression limits
were determined by a user survey on usability and acceptability of an image. The
compression limits were used to evaluate website content for potential performance
improvement. This information was then used to identify processes required to maintain
web server availability during high server loads. A web server prototype using a JPEG
filter was constructed to demonstrate the capability of automatic switching to lower data
size when high loads are detected.
