Use gzip (or something else) to serve compressed responses

fabienhuet · November 29, 2015, 11:04pm

It was so much a given for me that I always assumed that compression was handled somewhere. But I’ve just realized it was not the case.

What’s your strategy to enable it ? I know it’s not that much… but still.

benoit · November 30, 2015, 4:02am

When you run your Meteor application in Dev environment (meteor run) then you have no compression.
But after you deploy your app (meteor deploy foo.meteor.com) then HTTP compression is activated.
You can check this with the dev tools of your favorite web browser.

fabiodr · November 30, 2015, 5:46am

The WebSockets permessage-deflate (zip) is enabled by default since version 1.2.

If it is necessary, you can customize to another type of compression:

github.com

faye/permessage-deflate-node/blob/master/README.md

# permessage-deflate [![Build status](https://secure.travis-ci.org/faye/permessage-deflate-node.svg)](http://travis-ci.org/faye/permessage-deflate-node)

Implements the
[permessage-deflate](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-permessage-compression)
WebSocket protocol extension as a plugin for
[websocket-extensions](https://github.com/faye/websocket-extensions-node).

## Installation

```
$ npm install permessage-deflate
```

## Usage

Add the plugin to your extensions:

```js
var Extensions = require('websocket-extensions'),
    deflate    = require('permessage-deflate');

This file has been truncated. show original

News link:

github.com

meteor/meteor/blob/devel/History.md#v12-2015-sept-21

## v.NEXT

* The `meteor-babel` npm package (along with its Babel-related
  dependencies) has been updated to version 7.0.0-beta.35, a major update
  from Babel 6. Thanks to the strong abstraction of the `meteor-babel`
  package, the most noticeable consequence of the Babel 7 upgrade is that
  the `babel-runtime` npm package has been replaced by `@babel/runtime`,
  which can be installed by running
  ```js
  meteor npm install @babel/runtime
  ```
  in your application directory. There's a good chance that the old
  `babel-runtime` package can be removed from your `package.json`
  dependencies, though there's no harm in leaving it there. Please see
  [this blog post](https://babeljs.io/blog/2017/09/12/planning-for-7.0)
  for general information about updating to Babel 7 (note especially any
  changes to plugins you've been using in any `.babelrc` files).
  [PR #9440](https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/9440)

* The previously served `/manifest.json` application metadata file is now

This file has been truncated. show original

“Websockets now support the permessage-deflate extension, which compresses data on the wire. It is enabled by default on the server. To disable it, set $SERVER_WEBSOCKET_COMPRESSION to 0. To configure compression options, set $SERVER_WEBSOCKET_COMPRESSION to a JSON object that will be used as an argument to deflate.configure. Compression is supported on the client side by Meteor’s Node DDP client and by browsers including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox 37.”

fabienhuet · November 30, 2015, 7:04am

Please show me a link where it’s activated.

https://www.meteor.com/ does not use gzip on the document. content-encoding:gzip clearly does not appear in the response header.

.js and .css are served gziped in that case, but only because they are served from cloudfront. When you deploy an app with meteor deploy, they are not.

benoit · December 1, 2015, 3:49am

You can have a look at my application: crystal.meteor.com
According to Google Chrome, the javascript file has “content-encoding:gzip” in its response header.
Also, Chrome says “227 KB transferred”, but when I download the JS files, it weights 820 KB.
The difference comes from the compression.

fabienhuet · December 1, 2015, 8:59am

Here’s what I obtain on your application

And this checking application agrees : http://checkgzipcompression.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcrystal.meteor.com%2Fcards

No gzip.

benoit · December 1, 2015, 9:11am

But you are only talking about the HTML document here, which is almost empty (1 KB)
There is no point to compress it.
The important point is to compress the Javascript file and the CSS.

fabienhuet · December 1, 2015, 9:39am

Except when you go full SSR and that your HTML weight more than 200 ko.

=> http://zelip.co/