How does gzip work over the HTTP ?
When browsers make a request to a server, they send a Accept-Encoding header.
For most of the browser they will send Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate. The server then knows that this browser accepts data compressed using gzip or deflate. Now, the server sees Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sends the response compressed as gzip and marks it with the response header Content-Encoding: gzip.
The server can also optionally send another header Vary: Accept-Encoding. This tells proxies to vary the object in the proxy cache based on the Accept-Encoding header. The result is that the proxy will have a compressed and uncompressed version of the file in cache (and maybe even three: uncompressed, gzip compressed, deflate compressed). Failing to provide the Vary header may result in the wrong encoding going to an incompatible browser. The Vary header was introduced in HTTP/1.1
How to use gzip/deflate?
With Apache, it comes with a module mod_deflate.
In any standard installation of Apache it comes with mod deflate. If it is not enabled, you can enable using.$ a2nmod defalte
And reload conf or restart apache. After enabling, check the configuration
/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
# these are known to be safe with MSIE 6
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
# everything else may cause problems with MSIE 6
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript application/javascript application/ecmascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
</IfModule>
Nginx comes by default with gzip module
edit the fle /etc/nginx/nginx.confgzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
Issues with Amazon aws cloudfront and nginx and compression
If you are using cloudfront as a CDN to deliver the static content, then using nginx, you'll suddenly see that cloudfront is serving unzipped static contents.The reason is cloudfront uses HTTP 1.0 to make request to origin server, but in nginx there is directive "gzip_http_version" which is set to 1.1, just check the above configuration. So what you need to do it make it 1.0
gzip_http_version 1.0;
That will enable the compression for cloudfront requests as well.
