HTTP compression

Airlock can accelerate web applications by compressing web responses. This reduces both bandwidth and response times, particularly 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 a request header. Airlock Gateway uses either the ​Brotli or ​gzip ​compression by default (if the browser supports it), with Brotli ​being preferred.

  • 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-and
  • 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 detail page, tab Basic.

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

Input compression

Airlock Gateway can also handle gzip-compressed request bodies sent by browsers. This dramatically accelerates large uploads or web service requests.