Get NGINX to serve .gz compressed asset files

by

1) ensure you have Nginx > 1.2.x (to proper headers modifications) and compile with –with-http_gzip_static_module option

2) Enable this option gzip on (to serve back-end response with gzip header)

3) Setup assets location with gzip_static on
(to serve all.css.gz, all.js.gz files directly)

4) Prevent of etag generation and last-modify calculation for assets

5) Turn on the right Cache-control to cache SSL served static assets,
unless they will be expired once browser is closed

  location ~ ^/(assets|images|javascripts|stylesheets|swfs|system)/ {
      gzip_static on;
      expires     max;
      add_header  Cache-Control public;
      add_header  Last-Modified "";
      add_header  ETag "";
  }

if you would like to get full Nginx configuration, you can see this gist on Github.

open_file_cache helps you to cache: open file descriptors, their sizes, modification times and directory lookups, which is helpful for high load on the file system.

UPDATE: If you are living on the edge, turn on the SPDY to boost the SSL connection.

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