We have an app that queries for locations for a customer. We’re getting to the point where some customers could have upwards of 10,000 locations. The JSON response for this can get quite large, over 1mb sometimes.
I’m wondering first off the best way to compress this. We have apache in front of a Rails app running in trinidad with JRuby. Can I just set mod_deflate to always compress any responses that are application/json? How might I go about doing this?
Next, what is the browser support for gzip’d json? When I gzip a sample response of 200k it goes down to 30k. That’s a significant savings. We’re really like to be able to minimize the size of that response without having to minimize the number of locations returned.
If the browser supports gzip’d/deflated data, then JSON will go through it just fine. AJAX data is just a regular HTTP request that was done on behalf of a script, rather than a human. At the HTTP level, there’s absolutely zero difference between transferring some HTML or a JSON string – it’s just data.