hi all,

I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction. 

I am looking into whether enabling Gzip HTTP compression for our Solr clusters 
(all running Solr 6.6.5) would help performance; my problem is that I can’t 
figure out how to do that.

Our infrastructure setup is like this: our applications are running on a Cloud 
Foundry PAAS environment, but our Solr clusters run elsewhere. 
Communication between applications and Solr clusters is secured by firewalls on 
every Solr machine (we do have a Socks Proxy set up in the CF environment, but 
unfortunately we can't use that for Solr because of the incompatibility between 
Zookeeper and Java Nio I/O - much to the chagrin of our sysadmin).

We think that HTTP compression might be very interesting for us because of the 
hight volume of traffic between two separate environments.

Here’s what I found out so far: 

(re. config changes in Solr’s embedded Jetty)
- I’m aware that this is mostly a matter of configuring Jetty;
- it seems that this should preferably be set in the solr-jetty-context.xml 
file;
- this seems to relate to enabling Jetty's “GzipHandler”

(re. gzip ‘module’ activation ..?)
- it puzzles me that https://aroratimus.blogspot.com/2017/08/jettyserver-9.html 
mentions that Jetty’s GzipHandler should be enabled using two files not found 
in Solr's embedded Jetty: server/etc/jetty-gzip.xml and server/modules/gzip.mod 
(they are available when installing Jetty separately though);
- apparently, Jetty's Gzip module should be activated by adding 
—add-to-start=gzip to the server startup command. For the embedded Jetty in 
Solr, it seems that this would require changing the solr startup script

(re. changes in Solr client)
- the calling application should add the HTTP Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate ( 
according to 
https://menelic.com/2015/12/04/deploying-solrcloud-across-multiple-data-centers-dc-performance/
 )


I wonder, has anyone ever got this working? In particular:

- is that gzip ‘module’ activation necessary? That would seem a bit 
far-fetched, because it involves files not found in the Solr installation and 
possibly hacking the Solr startup script;
- what did you add to solr-jetty-context.xml in order to enable gzip 
compression?


I suppose that situations with high volumes of external network traffic between 
Solr and Client must be quite rare. Otherwise I’d think that a feature that 
potentially offers such obvious benefits (one of the pages above mentions a 
drop of 75% of network traffic and a 60% faster response time) would have been 
turned into an “enable http compression yes/no” setting by now :)

Anyhow, we’re stuck with it … I hope I can get it working.


Thank in advance for any advice!

Luthien
Api developer
Europeana.eu






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