Serve static assets GZIPed

[t-muehlberger]

Is there a simple way in FastAPI to serve static assets with GZIP compression when the browser supports it? Looking at the estimates generated by the Angular build tool I think this would make sense.

If there is no simple way to enable this in the python backend the optimization should probably be deferred to the reverse-proxy or CDN.

Definitely not a high priority optimization, just putting this here so it won't be overlooked in the future.

[jbethune]

When I look at https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/advanced/middleware/?h=gzip#gzipmiddleware then this seems to be fairly easy to implement. @scy what do you think?

[scy]

This looks to me as if it’ll do the gzip compression on the fly, with no server-side caching of the compressed data whatsoever. I’m not a fan. We shouldn’t compress the files again for every request.

[jbethune]

It looks like chatcontrol.dearmep.eu is running with nginx. Maybe the ngx_http_gzip_static_module solves our problem? According to this Stack Overflow answer we would need to create foo.gz for every file foo that we want to send in gzipped form.

[t-muehlberger]

@jbethune I don't know the details of our deployment but I am guessing that Nginx only acts as a reverse proxy and the files are still served by the python backend. We would probably need to make changes to our deployment so that Nginx serves the static files directly then this would work.

But I think we should not spend too much time on this issue now, this is an optimization that we can easily add after the release.