Can I disable GZIP on Google App Engine?

6
votes

I'm serving up tiny little chunks of minimized javascript through Google App Engine, and I think the GZIP-unGZIP process is slowing me down unnecessarily. (To clarify, I'm sending them quickly to many different websites who request them and I've optimized most of the other parts of the process).

For reference the files are so small that the GZIP savings can be less then the "Content-Encoding: gzip" header.

However, from the documentation

If the client sends HTTP headers with the request indicating that the client can accept compressed (gzipped) content, App Engine compresses the response data automatically and attaches the appropriate response headers.

Is there a setting in app.yaml or somewhere that I can disable GZIP-ing? It must be possible since some files are served unzipped.

1
performancegoogle-app-enginegzip
Is it possible this is a design error? You should expect exactly the problem you're running into when serving up tons of small files. The network latency and overhead are dominating your performance characteristics. Have you considered serving larger chunks? Are you also caching all of these tiny objects in memcache? - Kenan Banks
@Triptych, I'm serving the JS to many different sites (rather than one site requesting many files), and they are blocking calls for those sites so I'm trying to stay under 1/10th of a second. - Dave
It does seem very unlikely that this is a significant cause of latency. - Nick Johnson

1 Answers

4
votes

It's not currently possible to change this behavior from the server side (although, if you control the client, you can remove gzip from its Accept-Encoding header to accomplish the same thing)

There's an open bug about this with Google, and a team member has marked it "Acknowledged", but it doesn't look like there's been any action on it in the last year or so. You should probably add your voice to that ticket and star it for future notifications.