Monday, August 12, 2013

SAP HANA Cloud: gzip Compression

An easy way to save bandwidth is to use gzip compression and send less data to the client's browser.

Googling gzip provides some good explanations of the gzip compression. The first two results:
The rule of thumb is to turn on the compression for text based content (scripts, book, JSON or XML) since it would benefit from the heavily reduced bandwidth. Images and audio-visual formats would usually require no additional compression.

Following this recommendations up to now SAP HANA Cloud automatically compressed text based responses (MIME types text/html,text/xml,text/plain). 

The problem is that you could not say you don't want this to happen or to add another MIME type to the list of compressed responses. Setting compression threshold was also not supported.

To lift this limitation we introduced the ability to specify that you:
  • require compression or not
  • what MIME types you want to compress
  • what is the threshold that turns on the compression

We added 3 new parameters to the deploy command and you can specify when deploying your application:
  • --compressible-mime-type - comma separated list of MIME types for which compression will be used.Default: 'text/html, text/xml, text/plain'
  • --compression - enables or disables gzip response compression. Acceptable values: 'on', 'off', 'force' or an integer
  • --compression-min-size - responses bigger than this value get compressed and ones smaller than the value are not compressed. Default: 2048 bytes

To deploy your application with gizp compression of javascript you can issue: 
neo deploy myapp.properties --compression on --compressible-mime-type application/javascript

Behind the scene we are using Tomcat gzip compression described in the Apache Tomcat's Configuration Reference.

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