Reducing Network Bandwidth in Nginx with Gzip
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Browsers that support gzip compression send the header Accept-Encoding: gzip in its request and if the webserver supports gzip, then it can send the website data back compressed. Though recently I learned that this isn’t setup by default in nginx! This post will go over the configuration you’ll need to add to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf in order to support gzip compression. From my experience, enabling gzip compression reduced network traffic by 1/4.
Inside of the server {} block in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf add the following lines:
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied no-cache no-store private expired auth;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_min_length 1024;
gzip_types
application/atom+xml
application/geo+json
application/javascript
application/x-javascript
application/json
application/ld+json
application/manifest+json
application/rdf+xml
application/rss+xml
application/xhtml+xml
application/xml
font/eot
font/otf
font/ttf
image/svg+xml
text/css
text/javascript
text/plain
text/xml;
What each of the commands do:
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
gzip_disable |
Disables gzipping of responses for requests with “User-Agent” header fields matching any of the specified regular expressions. |
gzip_vary |
Enables or disables inserting the “Vary: Accept-Encoding” response header field if the directives gzip, gzip_static, or gunzip are active. |
gzip_proxied |
Enables or disables gzipping of responses for proxied requests depending on the request and response. The fact that the request is proxied is determined by the presence of the “Via” request header field. |
gzip_comp_level |
Sets a gzip compression *level* of a response. Acceptable values are in the range from 1 to 9. |
gzip_buffers |
Sets the *number* and *size* of buffers used to compress a response. By default, the buffer size is equal to one memory page. This is either 4K or 8K, depending on a platform. |
gzip_http_version |
Sets the minimum HTTP version of a request required to compress a response. |
gzip_min_length |
Sets the minimum length of a response that will be gzipped. The length is determined only from the “Content-Length” response header field. |
gzip_types |
Enables gzipping of responses for the specified MIME types in addition to “text/html”. The special value “*” matches any MIME type (0.8.29). Responses with the “text/html” type are always compressed. |