Nginx and HttpGzipStaticModule

Question

I have an nginx instance built with the gzip_static module

nginx version: nginx/1.2.6
built by gcc 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-11)
TLS SNI support disabled
configure arguments: --prefix=/home/nginx --user=nginx --group=nginx 
--without-http_autoindex_module --without-http_empty_gif_module 
--without-http_scgi_module --with-http_ssl_module 
--with-http_gzip_static_module --with-pcre=./library/pcre-8.32/ 
--with-zlib=./library/zlib-1.2.7/

My configuration file has the option turned on:

http {
    include mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    gzip off;
    gzip_static on;
    gzip_vary on;

    server {
        listen 8080;
        server_name  localhost;
        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }
    }
}

And I have a gzipped version of the file I'm looking to request in the same directory as the uncompressed file and both have the same timestamp.

-rw-r--r--  1 root root   123 2013-03-28 16:42:46.000000000 ../html/test.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   121 2013-03-28 16:42:46.000000000 ../html/test.html.gz

When I make a request I verified the Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch header is being sent. The request is also HTTP 1.1.

I can see via strace that the file is being opened, but because the content of the compressed file is different from the uncompressed, I know it's not returning the .gz version.

recv(3, "GET /test.html HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: x"..., 1024, 0) = 98
open("/home/nginx/html/test.html.gz", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE) = 4
open("/home/nginx/html/test.html", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE) = 7

I feel like I'm missing something fundamental here. I've read all I could find about the subject, but I think I'm at the end of my abilities.

Could someone please help me to understand where I've gone wrong or what I can do to further troubleshoot this problem?

Thank you.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 29 '13 at 02:14

Turns out there was a WAN optimizer between me and the target machine. This optimizer removed the Accept-Encoding header (as evidenced by logging) before the request reached nginx.

In case there are others coming here from a search, here is how I logged the header:

log_format withheader '[$time_local] "$request" $status [$http_accept_encoding]';
access_log logs/withheader.log withheader;

In nginx, you can log headers by using $http_ and then the header name, lower case, with spaces and hyphens converted to underscores.

Nginx and HttpGzipStaticModule

1 Answers1