Gzip

Gzip is an HTTP filter which enables Envoy to compress dispatched data from an upstream service upon client request. Compression is useful in situations where large payloads need to be transmitted without compromising the response time.

Configuration

v3 API reference
This filter should be configured with the name envoy.filters.http.gzip.

Attention

The window bits is a number that tells the compressor how far ahead in the text the algorithm should be looking for repeated sequence of characters. Due to a known bug in the underlying zlib library, window bits with value eight does not work as expected. Therefore any number below that will be automatically set to 9. This issue might be solved in future releases of the library.

Runtime

The Gzip filter can be runtime feature flagged via the runtime_enabled configuration field within the compressor field.

How it works

When gzip filter is enabled, request and response headers are inspected to determine whether or not the content should be compressed. The content is compressed and then sent to the client with the appropriate headers, if response and request allow.

By default compression will be skipped when:

A request does NOT contain accept-encoding header.
A request includes accept-encoding header, but it does not contain “gzip” or “*”.
A request includes accept-encoding with “gzip” or “*” with the weight “q=0”. Note that the “gzip” will have a higher weight then “*”. For example, if accept-encoding is “gzip;q=0,*;q=1”, the filter will not compress. But if the header is set to “*;q=0,gzip;q=1”, the filter will compress.
A request whose accept-encoding header includes any encoding type with a higher weight than “gzip“‘s given the corresponding compression filter is present in the chain.
A response contains a content-encoding header.
A response contains a cache-control header whose value includes “no-transform”.
A response contains a transfer-encoding header whose value includes “gzip”.
A response does not contain a content-type value that matches one of the selected mime-types, which default to application/javascript, application/json, application/xhtml+xml, image/svg+xml, text/css, text/html, text/plain, text/xml.
Neither content-length nor transfer-encoding headers are present in the response.
Response size is smaller than 30 bytes (only applicable when transfer-encoding is not chunked).

When compression is applied:

The content-length is removed from response headers.
Response headers contain “transfer-encoding: chunked” and do not contain “content-encoding” header.
The “vary: accept-encoding” header is inserted on every response.

Statistics

Every configured Gzip filter has statistics rooted at <stat_prefix>.gzip.* with the following:

Name	Type	Description
compressed	Counter	Number of requests compressed.
not_compressed	Counter	Number of requests not compressed.
no_accept_header	Counter	Number of requests with no accept header sent.
header_identity	Counter	Number of requests sent with “identity” set as the accept-encoding.
header_gzip	Counter	Number of requests sent with “gzip” set as the accept-encoding. This counter is deprecated in favour of header_compressor_used.
header_compressor_used	Counter	Number of requests sent with “gzip” set as the accept-encoding.
header_compressor_overshadowed	Counter	Number of requests skipped by this filter instance because they were handled by another filter in the same filter chain.
header_wildcard	Counter	Number of requests sent with “” set as the accept-encoding*.
header_not_valid	Counter	Number of requests sent with a not valid accept-encoding header (aka “q=0” or an unsupported encoding type).
total_uncompressed_bytes	Counter	The total uncompressed bytes of all the requests that were marked for compression.
total_compressed_bytes	Counter	The total compressed bytes of all the requests that were marked for compression.
content_length_too_small	Counter	Number of requests that accepted gzip encoding but did not compress because the payload was too small.
not_compressed_etag	Counter	Number of requests that were not compressed due to the etag header. disable_on_etag_header must be turned on for this to happen.