Forum Discussion

Travis_Collavo_'s avatar
Travis_Collavo_
Historic F5 Account
Apr 17, 2010

Server-side compression

Hello,

 

 

I'm interested in enabling HTTP compression between an LTM and some servers, and having the client-side transactions uncompressed. Enabling compression in an HTTP profile will offload compression from the server (and place the compression load on the clients), but I'm interested in offloading compression from the client instead. Anyone know of an easy way to go about this? I'm guessing I could insert an "Accept-Encoding: gzip" header into requests and enable compression if the server responds appropriately, but I'm looking for a more straightforward solution to this.

 

 

Any thoughts?

 

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Travis

 

config
design
  • hoolio's avatar
    hoolio
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Apr 20, 2010
    Hi Travis,

     

     

    Do you want LTM to compress request content between itself and the pool? If so, I don't think this is possible. If that's not what you're trying to do, can you clarify?

     

     

    Aaron
  • Travis_Collavo_'s avatar
    Travis_Collavo_
    Historic F5 Account
    Apr 21, 2010
    Hi Aaron,

     

     

    I'd like to have the responses from the server compressed between the server and the LTM, and have the responses uncompressed between the LTM and the client.

     

     

    Does that clarify?

     

     

    Regards,

     

    Travis
  • hoolio's avatar
    hoolio
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Apr 21, 2010
    Hi Travis,

     

     

    I don't think there is a way to have LTM uncompress the responses. Most solutions I've seen involve preventing the server from performing compression by removing the Accept-Encoding header from requests proxied to the pool.

     

     

    Out of curiosity, why do you want to uncompress compressed from the server before sending the response back to the client? Is the server to LTM connection very slow?

     

     

    Aaron
  • boneyard's avatar
    boneyard
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Feb 09, 2012

    not sure what the rules are about brining old topics back, but i have exactly the same question. is server side http compression possible?

     

     

    the scenario is that the client can't do compression and much bandwidth is wasted due to unoptimized xml messages. of course the client could also be changed, but having the big-ip do it seems like a nice intermediate solution.