Compressor

Compressor is an HTTP filter which enables Envoy to compress dispatched data from an upstream service upon client request. Compression is useful in situations when bandwidth is scarce and large payloads can be effectively compressed at the expense of higher CPU load or offloading it to a compression accelerator.

Note

This filter deprecates the HTTP Gzip filter.

Configuration

• v3 API reference

• This filter should be configured with the name envoy.filters.http.compressor.

How it works

When compressor 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.

Currently the filter supports gzip compression only. Other compression libraries can be supported as extensions.

An example configuration of the filter may look like the following:

http_filters:
- name: envoy.filters.http.compressor
  typed_config:
    "@type": type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.http.compressor.v3.Compressor
    disable_on_etag_header: true
    content_length: 100
    content_type:
      - text/html
      - application/json
    compressor_library:
      name: text_optimized
      typed_config:
        "@type": type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.compression.gzip.compressor.v3.Gzip
        memory_level: 3
        window_bits: 10
        compression_level: best_compression
        compression_strategy: default_strategy

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).

Please note that in case the filter is configured to use a compression library extension other than gzip it looks for content encoding in the accept-encoding header provided by the extension.

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.

Also the “vary: accept-encoding” header may be inserted even if compression is not applied due to incompatible “accept-encoding” header in a request. This happens when the requested resource still can be compressed given compatible “accept-encoding”. Otherwise, if an uncompressed response is cached by a caching proxy in front of Envoy, the proxy won’t know to fetch a new incoming request with compatible “accept-encoding” from upstream.

Statistics

Every configured Compressor filter has statistics rooted at <stat_prefix>.compressor.<compressor_library.name>.<compressor_library_stat_prefix>.* with the following: