HTTP compression

Airlock is able to accelerate web applications by compressing web responses. This reduces both bandwidth and response times, particulary for large text documents (HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc).

How does output compression work?

Airlock checks if the browser supports response compression. Most modern browsers can handle zipped content and inform the server by adding an Accept-Encoding request header. Airlock 7.8 and newer use either the Brotli or gzip compression by default if the browser supports it, with Brotli being preferred. Airlock systems older than 7.8 only support gzip.

Airlock restricts content compression to the following content types:

• text/html
• text/css
• text/javascript
• text/ecmascript
• text/plain
• text/xml
• application/javascript
• application/x-javascript
• application/ecmascript
• application/x-ecmascript
• application/json
• application/vnd.api+json
• application/rss+xml
• application/rdf+xml
• application/atom+xml
• application/x-axd
• application/xml
• application/xhtml+xml
• application/soap+xml
• image/svg+xml

Turn on output compression

To enable Brotli/gzip compression for a mapping, tick the checkbox Compress Response Traffic on the mapping's Basic tab.

Output compression works regardless of the capabilities of your backend systems: Airlock will also compress responses that were not compressed by your application server. The application just has to correctly declare the content type of the response (see list above).

Input compression

What happens if a browser sends a compressed request to Airlock?
No problem, Airlock can also handle compressed (gzip) request bodies. This greatly accelerates large uploads or web service requests.