http compression profile

The F5 removes gzip and deflate from the accept-encoding before sending the request on to the server. The default behavior of web servers is to only compress if the client have the accept-encoding gzip or deflate in its requests so the web server would not compress the content.

You can test it on the F5 with the following iRule:

when HTTP_RESPONSE {
log local0. [HTTP::header "Content-Encoding"]
}

The rule is triggered when the F5 receives the response from the pool member. If the log entry is empty, ie ":" the Content-Encoding header is not present, which means that the server did not compress the content. If you still see the Content-Encoding: gzip in the answer in the web browser it means that the F5 compressed the material.

Hope this is good enough evidence.

Kind regards, Patrik

Hi - search for "Compression" in the following article. If that does not help, report back;

http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm-concepts-11-2-0/ltm_http_profiles.html

Enabling the wan-optimized-compression should cover at least the basics. For everything else there's alternatives to compress by URI and content-type (check the guide that IheartF5 referred to). You can double check if something is compressed by disabling compression on the web server and then check the response headers in ie the developer tool of Chrome (CRTL + Shift + i).

Hey Carl,

I think there is a check box in HTTP Compression profile i.e. "Keep Accept Encoding", which stays unchecked by default. You can check the same checkbox to intact the "Accept Encoding" header whist passing the HTTP Request through F5.

I hope this would be helpful.

Cheers! Darshan