R – IIS6 not doing gzip compression when including Via header in request

gziphttphttp-via-headeriisiis-6

I have some static content going through a CDN. I am using IIS6's built in compression (gzip & deflate) for static content and this is working fine when I request it. However, when the CDN makes the initial request for the content, it is not being returned compressed. They therefore don't have compressed content to forward to people requesting it. (Yes this raises the issue of people requesting [the zipped] content from the CDN with a browser that can't handle the compression. – We'll put that to one side for now though)

Here's an example of requesting without the 'Via' header:

    HEAD /flash/swfobject.js HTTP/1.1  
    User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (i386-pc-win32)  
    Host: localhost:9120  
    Accept: */*  
    Connection: Keep-Alive  
    accept-encoding: gzip

And it returns a compressed response: 

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Length: 4357
    Content-Type: application/x-javascript
    Content-Encoding: gzip
    Expires: Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT
    Last-Modified: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:36:52 GMT
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Vary: Accept-Encoding
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
    Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:27:50 GMT

However, if I include a 'Via' header in the request (as the CDN does) then the result comes back uncompressed:

Request: 

    HEAD /flash/swfobject.js HTTP/1.1
    User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (i386-pc-win32)
    Host: localhost:9120
    Accept: */*
    Connection: Keep-Alive
    Via: 1.1 204.160.105.17:80 (Footprint 4.5/FPMCP)
    accept-encoding: gzip

Response: 

 
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Length: 14602
    Content-Type: application/x-javascript
    Expires: Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT
    Last-Modified: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:36:54 GMT
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
    Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:29:52 GMT

Yes these demos use 'localhost' in the request. I get the same result using the actual domain name from various machines on various networks though.

Two questions then:

  1. Could this be IIS not applying the compression due to the extra header? and if so what can I do about it?

  2. How can I tell if the proxy is decompressing the content before returning it?

Bonus question 3 – What can I do to investigate this problem further?

I am aware of question 332049, but that has the header in the response, not the request.

Best Answer

I stumbled across your question while researching this myself. I uncovered an article on MSDN and the short answer is that the Via header is used for proxies and proxies typically mess up compression. You either have the option of removing the header or you can change the setting in the IIS metabase (HcNoCompressionForProxies="FALSE"). I had success with both options.

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