KB Tutorial Questions

NGINX is an outstanding, open source web server. However, as with any server software, there are always ways to seek out as much performance as possible. One such performance route admins will take is that of the gzip compression available with NGINX.

With the help of compression, the server will be sending smaller objects to clients, thereby the pages will be faster to load. One of the big mistakes with compression is betting the whole farm and compressing every object available for each page.

Unfortunately, with this option comes a bit of a trade off. Compressing every object can take significant CPU resources from your server hardware. That, in turn, will cause a slowdown in NGINX, thus rendering the configuration null.

Simply do this instead.

Instead of compressing every object, configure NGINX to only compress large files and avoid the temptation to compress smaller files (such as images, executables, etc.).

To Accomplish this follow below:

add this below under the additional directive

gzip on;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_min_length 10240;
gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
gzip_types text/plain text/css text/xml text/javascript application/x-javascript application/xml;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.";

Once you've added the options, click Apply and then OK

Here's an explanation for the configuration, line by line:

gzip on; - enables gzip compression
gzip_vary on: - tells proxies to cache both gzipped and regular versions of a resource
gzip_min_length 1024; - informs NGINX to not compress anything smaller than the defined size
gzip_proxied - compress data even for clients that are connecting via proxies (here we're enabling compression if: a response header includes the "expired", "no-cache", "no-store", "private", and "Authorization" parameters)
gzip_types - enables the types of files that can be compressed
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\."; - disable compression for Internet Explorer versions 1-6

April 28, 2020 6:47 am