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I'm refactoring my Varnish VCL and can't figure out this one thing.

Varnish 3.0 natively supports gzipped content, and it essentially seems to do the right thing. See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12962493/35434

However, Varnish still performs a gunzip step, according to varnishlog, even though the client requests gzipped content and the backend responds with gzipped content. According to the Varnish docs, Varnish defaults to do_gzip=true, and also stores cache-objects compressed. So, why the gunzip?

Here are the relevant log entries:

11 RxURL        c /javascripts/general.js
11 RxHeader     c Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip
11 VCL_call     c fetch
13 TxHeader     b Accept-Encoding: gzip
13 RxHeader     b Content-Encoding: gzip
13 RxHeader     b Content-Type: application/javascript
11 Gzip         c u F - 1554 4476 80 80 12365
11 VCL_call     c deliver
11 TxHeader     c Content-Encoding: gzip

As you can see, the entire pipeline supports gzip, yet Varnish performs a gunzip during vcl_fetch. I have the assume it stores the objects compressed, and as you can see it delivers it compressed as well.

After this request, varnishstat shows the gunzip operation occurred:

$ varnishstat -1 | grep zip
n_gzip                       0         0.00 Gzip operations
n_gunzip                     1         0.00 Gunzip operations

Note: My VCL has no gzip configuration at all, nor do I do anything with the object's body. I'm relying on the sensible defaults, hence I'm not showing the VCL.

A gunzip operation is relatively light, but I'd still like to understand why, and possibly prevent a few hundred-thousand operations.

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Martijn Heemels
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1 Answers1

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Can you please set this into your vcl_fetch() section

set beresp.do_gunzip = false;

This should stop varnish doing the gzip.

Napster_X
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    I did as you said but it performs exactly the same. According to the docs, false is the default already: "beresp.do_gunzip: Boolean. Unzip the object before storing it in the cache. Defaults to false." – Martijn Heemels Jan 10 '13 at 13:38