Skip to main content

nginx enable compression and JS/CSS files

So one of my old colleague was trying to find some quick way of increasing performance for his pet project website so he asked me to take a look.  First thing I did was ran pagespeed and immediately I saw compression was off, css/js was not aggregated. JS/CSS aggregation would require either build changes or installing pagespeed so I thought quick 1 hour fix would be to just enable compression so I went and enabled " gzip  on;"  in nginx conf and it gave a good bump on login page but the home page after login, it kept complaining about JS/CSS not being compressed. I was scratching my head and left it as is that day.

Yesterday night finally I found out that turning gzip on would only compress text/html by default in nginx.  You need to explicity turn it on for other types. So I went and added the below and problem was solved.

    gzip_types  text/plain application/xml text/css text/js text/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript application/javascript application/json;
  

While doing this I also installed pagespeed with nginx. It was not as fun as installing it in apache because for nginx if you have to add module you need to recompile it from source. But it was worth it.  The pagespeed score that was 60 went up to 90.

I really like products that removes human touchpoints, Pagespeed is one of them, Thanks to Google for creating this awesome product.  At my employer's website before pagespeed I had to hunt developers every release to see if they had added proper version tags, they had followed build time aggregation guidelines and due to our release velocity, this was the first thing that was sacrificed and debt would keep piling up release after release. One day some customer would complain and everyone would scramble to get it fixed in one week. But thanks to pagespeed no more of this shit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Haproxy and tomcat JSESSIONID

One of the biggest problems I have been trying to solve at our startup is to put our tomcat nodes in HA mode. Right now if a customer comes, he lands on to a node and remains there forever. This has two major issues: 1) We have to overprovision each node with ability to handle worse case capacity. 2) If two or three high profile customers lands on to same node then we need to move them manually. 3) We need to cut over new nodes and we already have over 100+ nodes.  Its a pain managing these nodes and I waste lot of my time in chasing node specific issues. I loath when I know I have to chase this env issue. I really hate human intervention as if it were up to me I would just automate thing and just enjoy the fruits of automation and spend quality time on major issues rather than mundane task,call me lazy but thats a good quality. So Finally now I am at a stage where I can put nodes behing HAProxy in QA env. today we were testing the HA config and first problem I immediat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adding Jitter to cache layer

Thundering herd is an issue common to webapp that rely on heavy caching where if lots of items expire at the same time due to a server restart or temporal event, then suddenly lots of calls will go to database at same time. This can even bring down the database in extreme cases. I wont go into much detail but the app need to do two things solve this issue. 1) Add consistent hashing to cache layer : This way when a memcache server is added/removed from the pool, entire cache is not invalidated.  We use memcahe from both python and Java layer and I still have to find a consistent caching solution that is portable across both languages. hash_ring and spymemcached both use different points for server so need to read/test more. 2) Add a jitter to cache or randomise the expiry time: We expire long term cache  records every 8 hours after that key was added and short term cache expiry is 2 hours. As our customers usually comes to work in morning and access the cloud file server it ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spring 3.2 quartz 2.1 Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.

I am trying to enable HA on nodes and in that process I found that in a two test node setup a job that has a frequency of 10 sec was running into deadlock. So I tried upgrading from Quartz 1.8 to 2.1 by following the migration guide but I ran into an exception that says "Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.". After looking into spring and Quartz code I figured out that now Quartz is more strict and earlier the scheduler.addJob had a replace parameter which if passed to true would skip the durable check, in latest quartz this is fixed but spring hasnt caught up to this. So what do you do, well I jsut inherited the factory and set durability to true and use that public class DurableJobDetailFactoryBean extends JobDetailFactoryBean {     public DurableJobDetailFactoryBean() {         setDurability(true);     } } and used this instead of JobDetailFactoryBean in the spring bean definition     <bean i...
7 comments
Read more