Nginx – the best nginx compression gzip level

gzipnginx

I'm using nginx reverse proxy cache with gzip enabled. However, I got some problems from Android applications HTTP-requests to my Rails JSON web service. It seems when I turn off reverse proxy cache, it works ok because the response header comes without gzip. Therefore, I think the problem is caused by gzip. What is the most appropriate level of gzip compression?

gzip               on;
gzip_http_version  1.0;
gzip_vary          on;
gzip_comp_level    6;
gzip_proxied       any;
gzip_types         text/plain text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss;

Best Answer

The level of gzip compression simply determines how compressed the data is on a scale from 1-9, where 9 is the most compressed. The trade-off is that the most compressed data usually requires the most work to compress/decompress, so if you have it set fairly high on a high-volume website, you may feel its effect.

It sounds like your issues are more related to the HTTP headers on the requests. Usually gzip-compressed HTTP traffic is accompanied by the Content-Encoding: gzip header. If this is being dropped somewhere, then the client might not know to have to decompress the response.

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#!/bin/bash
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