Question - does this lib do compression on a separate thread?

[expressjs]

Question - does this lib do compression on a separate thread?

[ORESoftware]

well technically it wouldn't be a separate thread, it would be a separate Node.js process I guess, and this seems unlikely. So how does compression not slow down your server then?

[dougwilson]

This library simply uses Node.js's zlib library. Node.js uses a thread pool for compression, encryption, file I/O and DNS lookups. You can find out more details by asking the Node.js core team for how the asynx zlib functionality works, if you wish, as they would be able to explain it much better than myself.

But to sum it up: the operations run in a thread pool in the Node.js process.

[dougwilson]

Here is a link to a thread with the answer on the Node.js mailing list, answered by a core committer: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/WR4coxriQSM

[ORESoftware]

thanks that's great info

[dougwilson]

No problem!

[ORESoftware]

hey Doug, here is my question of the hour - the way this is set up it will compress files for every request. so if a client A requests a text based asset, Express will compress it and then serve it. When client B comes around and requests the same asset, it will do the same thing over again. Is there a way to GZIP assets with ZLIB before the server starts?

[ORESoftware]

in other words, is there a way to either

(1) cache the results of gzip process (saving .gz files onto server) during server runtime
(2) write out .gz file(s) onto the server before it starts up

it seems like (2) is a much better idea, especially since I personally really only have one production file to deploy, I can just gzip the one file before the server starts and then point to a .gz file instead of a .js file in my index .html file.

[ORESoftware]

I just saw the question about caching from another user, so I opened up a new issue/question. Hopefully the new question/issue I asked is a good one, probably better to answer the question over there than here. I can move/delete the comments from the last hour on this thread into the new issue.

[dougwilson]

Hi! There certainly is, though not with this module (which is simply on-the-fly compression, meant for dynamic content rather than static content). There are other modules on npm just for the specific purpose of doing this with static files (typically your pre-compress with a grunt/gulp task and then serve with a specialized module).

[ORESoftware]

ok thanks! I guess I can add the names to those modules to this thread later, it all makes sense and I appreciate the info