Performance Project by Bruno Skvorc

Author:Bruno Skvorc [Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SitePoint
Published: 2017-08-08T23:00:00+00:00

Compression

Next, GTmetrix gave us a warning about the size and compression of our resources:

In production, this is an insignificant thing, and improving on this wouldn't make much of a difference in this particular case, with just a couple of kilobytes to spare. But, as these guides are here to show the way with other, more substantial applications, we'll cover this improvement as well.

Images could be optimized in advance, but as these are dynamic images created with Glide, which we covered in another article, we won't be doing that. In fact, Glide provides ways to set image quality. But sometimes we won't be using Glide to handle our images, so we'll first try another approach here.

Inside of our Nginx server block, we'll add a couple of lines that instruct Nginx to compress our content:

gzip on; gzip_disable "msie6"; gzip_vary on; gzip_proxied any; gzip_comp_level 9; gzip_buffers 16 8k; gzip_http_version 1.1; gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml ➥application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript image/jpeg;

An explanation of each of these settings would be out of the scope of this article. Each of these items is explained on the Nginx website, but one thing worth discussing is gzip_comp_level.

With compression, the common wisdom is that there's a tradeoff. We gain some on network bandwidth, by making our files smaller, but then we lose some in our server CPU cycles required to gzip our resources on and on, on every request. Or as this Cloudflare blog post (which we'll come back to later on) says:

There is a tradeoff between compression speed and transfer speed. It is only beneficial to increase your compression ratio if you can reduce the number of bytes you have to transfer faster than you would actually transfer them.

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