Why doesn't gzip speed up website loading times?

• 0
  I read about the loading time of pages of sites and almost everywhere it is written that to speed up loading, you can also use gzip. I took a simple nginx configuration as tests:
  

  user nginx;
  worker_processes 4;
  pid     /run/nginx.pid;
  error_log       /var/log/nginx/error.log;
  events {
          worker_connections 1024;
  }
  http {
          access_log      /var/log/nginx/access.log;
          server {
                  listen          80;
                  server_name	localhost;
  		gzip	       	on;
  		gzip_types text/html text/plain image/png image/jpeg text/css text/xml text/javascript application/x-javascript application/xml;
                  
  		location / {
                          root /data/www;
                  }
          }
  }

  
  In / data / www I threw index.html from ordinary characters, without pictures and other things, weighing 1MB.
  
  As a result, without gzip I have the following:
  I turn on gzip:
  
  
  The question is - why hasn't the page load time accelerated? I also tried different gzip options, but the result is the same.

  Linux Leah Velez, Nov 11, 2020

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2 Answers
• 0

  Question - why didn't page load times get faster?

  
  
  
  Well, probably because your gzip compression is not configured correctly.
  
  For example, writing gzip_types image / png image / jpeg is pointless, because the binary data of the pictures is so compressed and you won't get any winnings.
  
  
  Correctly write this:
  
  

  http {
  
     ....
  
     gzip on;
  
     gzip_http_version 1.0;
  
     gzip_min_length 512;
  
     gzip_buffers 64 8k;
  
     gzip_comp_level 5;
  
     gzip_proxied any;
  
     gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript application/javascript;
  
     ...
  
  }

  
  
  
  You may not write anything in the server {} section if you do not plan to change the parameters.
  
  
  Then we take curl and check:
  

  curl -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" -I http://mysite.ru/index.html

  
  
  
  we get the answer
  
  

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  
  Server: nginx
  
  Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2017 11:32:00 GMT
  
  Content-Type: text/html
  
  Last-Modified: Tue, 12 Apr 2016 06:48:17 GMT
  
  Connection: keep-alive
  
  ETag: W/"570c9a31-576"
  
  Content-Encoding: gzip

  
  
  
  Pay attention to the Content-Encoding field
  
  
  For the test from the console, we take the Apache Benchmark utility:
  

  ab -n 1 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" http://mysite.ru/index.html

  
  
  
  We look at the fields marked in bold, when gzip is off, they increase.
  
  

  Concurrency Level: 1
  Time taken for tests: 0.128 seconds
  
  Complete requests: 1
  
  Failed requests: 0
  Total transferred: 3405 bytes
  
  HTML transferred: 3025 bytes
  
  Requests per second: 7.80 [# / sec] (mean)
  
  Time per request: 128.249 [ms] (mean)
  
  Time per request: 128.249 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
  
  Transfer rate: 25.93 [Kbytes / sec] received
  
  
  Connection Times (ms)
  
  min mean [+/- sd] median max
  
  Connect: 90 90 0.0 90 90
  
  Processing: 38 38 0.0 38 38
  
  Waiting: 38 38 0.0 38 38
  Total: 128 128 0.0 128 128

  
  
  
  Well, let's take Firefox and look at the Transmitted and Size fields, if the compression works, then the Transmitted should be less than the Size.

  Anonymous

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• 0
  Judging by the Network panel, an uncompressed file was transferred - 0.99 Mb.
  
  For example, this page includes the file

  https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=PT+Sans:400,700,400italic&subset=latin,cyrillic

  
  
  In Network its size is shown as 1.1 Kb, and if saved to disk - 4.1 Kb. That is, the panel shows the actual size transmitted over the network. In your case, this means that compression for this client is not working for some reason.

  Anonymous

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