Elastic Search query JSON response compression

Question

How can we compress JSON response of a search request? I have tried following setting, but it didn't seem to work. http.compression = true

Request Header has following information.

Accept:"application/json, text/plain,/"

Accept-Language:"en-US,en;q=0.5"

Accept-Encoding:"gzip, deflate"

Content-Type:"application/json;charset=utf-8"

Answer 1

You can check if http compression is enabled by performing a simple curl GET request like this:

curl -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' -D - http://localhost:9200

If compression is enabled you will see the header Content-Encoding: gzip and the response will look compressed (random weird characters).

If compression is NOT enabled, you'll see the normal ES info response, something like this:

{
  "status" : 200,
  "name" : "Steven Lang",
  "cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "1.7.0",
    "build_hash" : "929b9739cae115e73c346cb5f9a6f24ba735a743",
    "build_timestamp" : "2015-07-16T14:31:07Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "4.10.4"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}