HTTP compression

While communicating with a remote service, an unavoidable amount of time is spent sending and receiving data over the network. To reduce the network latency from an application's point of view, service designers can ensure that the number of round trips is kept to a minimum. This is the subject of the remainder of this chapter. For now, however, let's take a look at another technique that can be employed to reduce the amount of data that is sent across the wire. The HTTP specification defines a mechanism for applying compression algorithms over responses before being transmitted to clients.

Content negotiation

HTTP compression revolves around content negotiation between the two parties (the server and the client). The client must notify the server about what compression algorithms it supports. Typically, these would be deflate and gzip. Clients do so by adding the following header to requests:

"Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate"

If the server supports...