Should we enable compression in nginx

[jeroen]

Currently nginx does not compress. We can test locally:

curl --http2 --compressed -v -H "Connection: close" -H "host: ropensci.r-universe.dev" http://localhost/magick/doc/intro.html > out.html

The compression is done by cloudflare. Perhaps doing it in nginx too will increase performance, but perhaps not.

[jeroen]

Also consider https://github.com/r-universe-org/help/issues/436#issuecomment-2198543467 to test if cloudflare really compresses all types on the fly, and how it affects the content-length response header.

See https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/brotli/content-compression/

[jeroen]

Right now I don't think we gain much:

• Clouldflare automatically compresses text based content (html) when the client supports it. This is also why html pages lose the content-length response header in cloudflare.
• Most non-text files (images, pdf) are not very compressible so we don't gain much.
• Caching with compression in nginx is tricky and disabled by default for proxied or compressed content. Sadly the gunzip module which would allow you to uncompressed cached content when needed, is an nginx-plus module.