EP 28: Response Compression in ASP.NET Core

Read Time : 3 Mins

In today’s newsletter we are going to discuss:

• What is response compression

• Benefits

• Implementation

  • How to implement it

  • Compression providers

  • Compression levels

  • How to make custom provider

• When should we compress our response

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What is response compression

Response compression is a technique that can be used to reduce the size of HTTP responses.

Response compression reduces the size of HTTP response which ultimately increases the responsiveness of app.

Benefits of response compression

Pros of response compression are list below:

1. Improved performance

   Compressing the response can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted over the network, which can lead to faster page load times and a better user experience.

2. Reduced bandwidth usage

   By compressing the response, you can reduce the amount of data that is transmitted over the network, which can lead to reduced bandwidth usage and lower costs for hosting and bandwidth

3. Better SEO

   Search engines take page load times into account when ranking websites, so a faster loading website may rank higher in search results.

How to implement it

We can configure it using the . NET middleware —> AddResponseCompression like this:

When we set EnableForHttps = true it can expose our requests to CRIME and BREACH attacks, so while using response compression make sure to avoid them by using anti forgery tokens when you are compressing data.

Compression Providers

.NET provides us two compression providers:

• BrotliCompression

• GzipCompression

By default .NET middleware uses Brotli Compression Provider

Compression Levels

Each provider has following compression levels:

1. Optimal

   The compression operation should be optimally compressed, even if the operation takes a longer time to complete

2. Fastest

   The compression operation should complete as quickly as possible, even if the resulting file is not optimally compressed

3. No Compression

   No compression should be performed on the file

4. Smallest Size

   The compression operation should create output as small as possible, even if the operation takes a longer time to complete

This is how we can set compression level for our providers:

Custom providers

Create a simple class and implement ICompressionProvider method and then you can add your CustomCompressionProvider like this in Program file:

When should we compress and when not

1. Responses that are not natively compressed(e.g. CSS,JS,HTML,XML,JSON) are best candidates for compression

2. Don’t compress natively compressed assets (e.g. PNG) and smaller files (with 150-1000 bytes)

How can I verify that my compression is working

Add middlewares, set compression levels and send request from postman and by setting different values of Accept-Encoding in header.

MIME Types Supported by Default

These are the MIME types by default supported :

• text/css

• text/xml

• text/json

• text/html

• text/plain

• application/xml

• application/json

• application/wasm

• application/javascript

For more in depth knowledge you can read from Official Docs of Microsoft

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