A practical checklist for response compression

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Run through this the next time response compression comes up.

Speed is a feature people notice only in its absence, and then they leave rather than complain. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The checklist

• Text compresses dramatically and costs almost nothing to enable
• Modern algorithms beat older ones by a useful margin
• Already-compressed formats gain nothing from it
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why it matters

Text compresses dramatically and costs almost nothing to enable. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How to tell if yours is fine

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Three things worth confirming about response compression before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Text compresses dramatically and costs almost nothing to enable — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.