September 12th, 2024

Always support compressed response in an API service

Enabling compressed responses in API services reduces bandwidth costs and enhances user experience. Frameworks like Gin and Nginx facilitate gzip compression, making it a straightforward enhancement for web services.

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Always support compressed response in an API service

Enabling support for compressed responses in API services is essential for reducing bandwidth costs and improving user experience. As server and client device capabilities have increased, the process of compressing and decompressing data has become efficient and cost-effective. For instance, using the `curl` command, a comparison shows that a non-compressed response can be significantly larger than a compressed one. To implement this feature, developers should handle the `Accept-Encoding` header in their server configurations. Popular frameworks, such as the Gin framework in Go, provide middleware to easily enable gzip compression. A simple example demonstrates how to set up a server that responds with compressed data. Additionally, for those using Nginx, enabling gzip compression can be done by modifying the server configuration file. Overall, supporting compressed responses is a straightforward yet impactful enhancement for web services.

- Enabling compressed responses reduces bandwidth costs and improves performance.

- Modern servers and clients can efficiently handle data compression and decompression.

- The Gin framework in Go offers middleware for easy gzip support.

- Nginx can be configured to support gzip compression with simple adjustments.

- Using tools like `curl` can help test and verify the effectiveness of compression.

Link Icon 4 comments
By @frizlab - 2 months
Your API should always be behind a reverse proxy (e.g. nginx) which will almost always have compression enabled. Not sure enabling compression at the API level is necessary.
By @DamonHD - 2 months
Yes, indeed. And accept at least gzip compression on the client side!

https://www.earth.org.uk/RSS-efficiency.html

By @sebazzz - 2 months
Isn’t https compression a no-go due to BREACH and CRIME?