Chrome Not Showing Any Compression Occuring

[sbryfcz]

I'm having trouble getting compression to work properly. I've tried reading a lot of resources and your issue pages but I'm still stuck. Oddly, when I use services like http://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/ it shows that the service is compressed. But when I use chrome to simple try and go to the service, I dont see any compression happening. When I turn on DEBUG=compression I see the message

compression gzip compression +8m.

So I'd like to believe it is working, but the response in the browser shows no compression. Any advice would be great and appreciated! Thanks!

I have a seemingly simple test server/service

var compression = require('compression');
var express = require('express');

var app = express();

//turn on compression
app.use(compression({ threshold: 0 }));

// simple get service to get 10000 random numbers
app.get('/events', function (req, res) {
    console.log(req.headers);

    var obj = [];

    for (var i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
        obj.push({
            number: Math.random()
        });
    }

    res.send(obj);
});

//start the server
var server = app.listen(80, function () {
    console.log('Address', server.address());
    console.log('Listening on port %d', server.address().port);
});

The headers in my req are

    { via: '1.1 DETHQTMG109',
     'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)   Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36',
      host: 'usaievents.cloudapp.net',
      'cache-control': 'max-age=0',
      accept: 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8',
      'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
      connection: 'Keep-Alive',
      'if-modified-since': 'Tue, 20 Jan 2015 15:21:29 GMT', 
      'if-none-match': 'W/"YxqKyY8MDi7MUoNr2htsjg=="',
      'accept-encoding': 'gzip' 
    }

[dougwilson]

Are you sure you are not behind a proxy when accessing from your machine?

[sbryfcz]

Wow. Today I learned! Fixed and working fine when I'm not on the proxy. Thanks so much.

[dougwilson]

It's no problem :) I was suspicious because you said that compression test site worked and then the request headers you posted had a Via header, which is typically inserted by a proxy. Once a request goes through a proxy, whether or not you see the response is compressed is dependent on the proxy, rather than what the source server did :)