Gzip not compressing response body with status code other than 200, 403, 404

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 02:32:02AM -0400, soniclee wrote:

> I met same problem while try to gzip response with other status code. Any
> update for this issue?

In some cases it's just not possible to compress 
response, e.g. you can't compress 206 as it doesn't contain full 
entity body.  Or you can't compress 304 as it has no entity at 
all.

In many cases it's unwise/unsafe to compress responses with some  
status codes.  I.e. you probably don't want to compress 400 (Bad 
Request) response even if client claimed gzip support before it 
did some syntax error in the request - as you already know client 
did something wrong, and it's better to return easy to understand 
response.  Or e.g. if you try to return 500 (Internal Server 
Error) due to memory allocation error - you probably don't want to 
allocate memory for gzip.

Due to the above reasons gzip compression is done only for certain 
common and safe response codes.  And from the above explanation it 
should be more or less obvious that it just can't be enabled for 
all status codes.  

If you think gzip compression should be enabled for some specific 
status code - please provide your suggestions with reasoning.

Maxim Dounin