spec: Support for payload compression?

[patrys]

HTTP/2 only compresses the headers, so delivering webhooks with large payloads consumes a lot of bandwidth. It would be nice if a future version of the spec automatically compressed payloads above a certain threshold and required that recipients support the resulting content-encoding.

[tasn]

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So suggest that webhook consumers support compression in the operational section?

Btw, we also recommend keeping webhook payloads small, though even at 20-40kb compression can be a boon if you're sending many messages.

[patrys]

My personal (Saleor Commerce) use case is that we allow users to write custom GraphQL queries for webhooks so they don't have to hit the API back immediately in response to a webhook event. Those can result in up to 1MB of JSON, which is not ideal but still better than a 100kb webhook followed by ten 100kb fetches.

[zekth]

What comes to my mind is should we even let the lib handle the compression by itself? Because we can have several cases:

• compression/decompression is handled at proxy level like nginx: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/compression/
• compression/decompression is handled via a middleware: https://github.com/fastify/fastify-compress
• compression/decompression is handled in the http handler itself.

What i'm seeing in here is the case you're picturing is the third one. However i'm not sure the lib itself should take care of it; the lib / spec are targeting the real content of it and not what the carrier transports. I'm not sure we should introduce the compression handling directly in the lib.

[tasn]

Upon further reading the original message I think I misread it. The way I read it is to include a line somewhere that it's recommended that the receiving server (or the sending client? or both?) support HTTP compression. Just a recommendation somewhere in the spec to mention that this is useful. I very much agree that we should not be doing compression in the libs, this is a transport layer concern (just like @zekth said).