gzip proxied content, where?

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 03:55:41PM -0400, nfn wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> What is the best practice to gzip content? In the frontend or at the backend? Wich performs better?

>From performance point of view - gzipping at backend will allow 
you to save some internal network bandwidth.  But

1. It won't allow you to do frontend processing (ssi, charset 
conversions, xslt, adding headers/footers via addition_module, 
substitutions via sub_module; not sure how this will affect cache 
if used).

2. If other servers used as backends (not nginx), and gzipping on 
them may be a bad idea since nginx usually faster and more 
efficient.

So general practice is to avoid gzipping on backends and do this 
on nginx frontend.

Maxim Dounin