What is Compression?
Compression reduces the size of data by removing redundancy, either losslessly (the original can be perfectly reconstructed, as in ZIP or PNG) or lossily (some detail is permanently discarded for a smaller file, as in JPEG or MP3). The right choice depends on whether exact byte-for-byte fidelity matters for that data.
Example
Gzip compression can shrink a repetitive JSON API response by 70-90% over the wire.
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