Reducing Deployment Overhead
Over the past weeks, I completed several tasks that are worth highlighting from a technical perspective. While progress was made across all major areas, this post focuses specifically on efficiency, simplicity, and deployment overhead.
Compression Strategy: ZStandard
I revisited deployment compression. As described in a previous post, I initially chose LZMA2. While effective, it proved to be CPU-intensive and slow.
After benchmarking alternatives, ZStandard (.zstd) stood out immediately:
- Archives are only a few percent larger
- Compression speed is roughly 5× faster
This trade-off is clearly worth it. ZStandard is now the preferred and future-proof choice.
Architectural Cleanup: Landing Page Simplification
Next came a major simplification of the landing page. I removed a large amount of early-stage logic written before the overall architecture was fully clear.
The long-running mascot has now been deprecated, along with several experimental features. As project complexity steadily increased, the landing page had become an unnecessary maintenance and failure concentration point.
Results:
- +2000 lines of code removed
- ~40 files deleted
This significantly reduced surface area and long-term maintenance cost.
Media Optimization: WebP & AVIF
Some deployments were still taking far too long. The root cause was media size.
All images were previously shipped as high-resolution PNGs — great quality, poor efficiency. For the Azure Web deployment alone, image assets had grown to ~300 MB.
After evaluation, I switched to:
WebPfor standard-quality imagesAVIFfor high-quality images
Initial conversion — especially AVIF — was slow, even on a multi-threaded, high-performance system. However, the payoff was substantial:
- No visible quality loss
- Minimal to non-existent artifacts
- Total size reduced from ~400 MB to ~100 MB
A 4x reduction with negligible downsides. WebP delivered very similar results, and I chose it for standard resolution to ensure the broadest possible compatibility going forward.