HTTP compression in PHP and Symfony apps

HTTP Compression Improve performance of your Symfony apps Photo by
Anna Evans

Kévin Dunglas ➔ Co-founder of Les-Tilleuls.coop ➔ Symfony Core Team
➔ Creator of API Platform, FrankenPHP and Mercure ➔ Maintainer of Caddy @dunglas

Compression?!

The process of encoding information using fewer bits than the
original representation. WIKIPEDIA What is compression?

Why is Compression Useful for Web Apps? ➔ Reduces the
size of resources to be transmitted ➔ Can reduce the time needed to download (or upload) a resource through a network ➔ Saves bandwidth ➔ Key factor in website performance (HTTP responses can be compressed) Photo by Denny Müller

Efficiency Depending on the file, the compression format and level,
compression can reduce the size of a file from 2 to 3 times

➔ Space-time tradeoﬀ: • compressing and decompressing takes computational resources
(CPU, RAM) • and (some) time to execute the algorithm ➔ In the HTTP context, compression is useful if: • it decreases latency (the time required for encoding/decoding is less than the time required to download the deleted data) • additional computation costs do not exceed saved bandwidth costs Compression is a Tradeoﬀ Photo by Mathew Schwartz

How Does Compression Work?

Lossy or Lossless Lossless compression: ➔ no loss of information
after decoding ➔ ZIP, gzip, Brotli, PNG, GIF… ➔ Best for HTML, JS, CSS, SVG ➔ Focus of this talk Lossy compression: ➔ Inexact approximation ➔ data (quality) loss ➔ JPEG, MPEG, MP3…

Useful for most HTTP responses (but not all, wait for
it!) Two popular techniques: ➔ Huﬀman coding assigns the shortest possible code to each transferred symbol, or group of symbols ➔ Static dictionaries share symbols between the client and the server Some formats support custom dictionaries, but it’s not supported by browsers yet They can be combined! Lossless Compression Photo by Niklas Ohlrogge

Huﬀman Tree (1952) © CMG Lee for Wikipedia

➔ Define how hard the compressor looks for matching strings
(how many symbols to use in the Huffman tree) ➔ The higher the level: • the smaller the final size • the most time-consuming and CPU-intensive ➔ Remember: compression is a tradeoff Compression Levels Photo by Florian Hahn

Words from Brotli's dictionary (13504 in all) time जानकारी the
University of <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC " (){\n text-decoration:under CIA World Factbook .JPG

Compression and HTTP

➔ zstd (Zstandard), Facebook, 2016 ➔ br: (Brotli), Google, 2013
➔ gzip, GNU, 1996 ➔ deflate, GNU, 1996 ➔ compress, Lempel-Ziv-Welch, 1984 ➔ identity, no compression or modiﬁcation Supported Formats in Accept-Encoding Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi

Benchmarks Compressor name Ratio Compression Decompression zstd 1.5.6 -1 2.887
510 MB/s 1580 MB/s zlib 1.2.11 -1 2.743 95 MB/s 400 MB/s brotli 1.0.9 -0 2.702 395 MB/s 430 MB/s Source: Facebook

A surprising amount of sites are using low level gzip
compression, and should consider increasing their compression levels. ➔ For dynamic content ◦ Brotli level 5 usually results in smaller payloads, at similar or slightly slower compression times. ◦ zStandard level 12 often produces similar payloads to Brotli level 5, with compression times faster than gzip and Brotli. ➔ For static content ◦ Brotli level 11 produces the smallest payloads ◦ zStandard is able to apply their highest compression levels much faster than Brotli, but the payloads are still smaller with Brotli. PAUL CAVANO - Choosing Between gzip, Brotli and zStandard Compression (19 Mar 2024) State of the art

Browser Support: Gzip (and so Zopﬂi) ✅ supported by all
browsers, proxies and CDN

Browser Support: Brotli (98%) Source: MDN / caniuse

Browser Support: Zstandard (70%) Source: MDN / caniuse

Going further

Real-World HTTP Compression

What to compress? ➔ Everything… ➔ …except formats already compressed
• JPEG, PNG, GIF • WebP (sometimes) • WOFF/WOFF2 fonts • XLSX, DOCX, PPTX… • PDF (sometimes) • ZIP, gz, bz2, RAR… • binaries (sometimes) ➔ especially eﬃcient with text ﬁles Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters

Dynamic Content

➔ “on the ﬂy” compression ➔ Compression can be done
by: • PHP itself (not my recommendation) • The origin web server • The CDN ➔ Prefer Zstandard • Fallback on Brotli ◦ Fallback on gzip ➔ Use a fast compression level to not increase latency Dynamic Content (HTML, JSON…) Photo by Crystal Kwok

FrankenPHP / Caddy (Dynamic Content) encode zstd br gzip #
br is natively supported by FrankenPHP. # With Caddy, you need github.com/dunglas/caddy-cbrotli # (uses cgo)

NGINX (gzip, Dynamic Content) gzip on; # http://blog.klauspost.com/gzip-performance-for-go-webservers/ gzip_comp_level 5;
# text/html is always compressed gzip_types text/css text/javascript; # ... gzip_proxied no-cache no-store private expired auth; gzip_min_length 512; gzip_vary on;

NGINX (Brotli, Dynamic Content) # Needs https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli brotli on; brotli_comp_level
5; brotli_types text/css text/javascript; # ...

Apache (gzip, Dynamic Content) SetOutputFilter DEFLATE DeflateCompressionLevel 5 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE
text/html text/css text/javascript Header append Vary User-Agent

Apache (Brotli, Dynamic Content) SetOutputFilter BROTLI_COMPRESS DeflateCompressionLevel 5 AddOutputFilterByType BROTLI_COMPRESS
text/html text/css text/javascript Header append Vary User-Agent

Apache (Zstandard, Dynamic Content) ❌ not available

Dynamic Content: Misc

BREACH Attack (2012) ➔ Compression side-channel attack ➔ Data can
leak, even if the content is encrypted with TLS ➔ To be aﬀected, the page must: • Be compressed • Reﬂect user data (POST, query param…) • Contain a secret that doesn’t change at each request ➔ Symfony CSRF tokens are safe by default ➔ The new stateless CSRF feature introduced in Symfony 7.2 is perfect for this use case Photo by Chris Lynch

Is your CDN modifying the response? (ex: CloudFlare proxy, WAF,
optimizers…) ➔ yes • Don’t compress, or compress as a low (fast) level • Your CDN will decompress the response from the origin server, then re-compress it ➔ no • Compress as usual, the CDN will just proxy the response CDN and Dynamic Content Photo by Diana Polekhina

Static Content

➔ Precompress! ➔ Use the most efficient (slowest) level •
Compressed only one time ➔ Prefer Brotli • Fallback on Zopfli, a reimplementation of Gzip slower but more efficient Static files (JS, CSS, SVG, static HTML…) Photo by Nicolas Picard

How to Precompress?

Conﬁg framework: asset_mapper: precompress: enabled: true

Usage bin/console asset-map:compile # All assets will be compressed in
Brotli, Zstandard and Gzip # The extension is appended to the original file name: # foo.js foo.js.br foo.js.zst foo.js.gz bin/console asset:compress robots.txt # The file passed as argument is compressed # robots.txt robots.txt.br robots.txt.zst robots.txt.gz # A asset_mapper.compressor is also available (ex: file upload)

➔ Webpack: compression-webpack-plugin ➔ Rollup / Vite: rollup-plugin-gzip ➔ Both
support Brotli, Zopﬂi and gzip, but not Zstandard JavaScript Tools

FrankenPHP / Caddy (Static Content) file_server { precompressed }

NGINX (Static Content) gzip_static on; gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private
auth; # Needs https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli brotli_static on # Needs https://github.com/tokers/zstd-nginx-module zstd_static on;

Apache (Static Content) AddEncoding gzip .gz AddEncoding br .br #
Zstandard is not supported RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.gz -s RewriteRule ^(.*)\ $1\.gz [QSA] RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} br RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.br -s RewriteRule ^(.*)\ $1\.br [QSA] # Serve correct content types, and prevent double compression. RewriteRule \.css\.gz$ - [T=text/css,E=no-brotli:1] RewriteRule \.js\.gz$ - [T=text/javascript,E=no-brotli:1] RewriteRule \.css\.br$ - [T=text/css,E=no-gzip:1] RewriteRule \.js\.br$ - [T=text/javascript,E=no-brotli:1] # ...

➔ Compression is one of the easiest and most eﬃcient
ways to improve webperf, use it! ➔ Compress dynamic content using Zstandard ➔ Pre-compress static content with Brotli at the highest level (Use the new Symfony AssetMapper pre-compression feature) ➔ Using FrankenPHP and Caddy is the easiest way to serve compressed responses with modern eﬃcient formats! Take Away

Web and Cloud Experts ➔ Dev: PHP, JS, Go, Rust...
➔ DevOps and SRE ➔ Consultancy and maintenance ➔ Agile management, UX and UI design… ➔ [email protected] 💌

Thank you! ➔ Come at our booth for swag, questions
and discussions! les-tilleuls.coop [email protected] @coopTilleuls

HTTP compression in PHP and Symfony apps

HTTP compression in PHP and Symfony apps

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