Creating a RESTful Web API template in .NET Core 1.1 – Part #3: Improving the performance by using compression

One of the simplest and most effective improvements you can make to your website or web service is to compress the stream of data sent from the server. With .NET Core 1.1, it’s really simple to set this up – I’ve decided to include this in my template project, but the instructions below will work for any .NET Core MVC or Web API project.

Only really ancient browsers are going to have problems with gzip – I’m pretty happy to switch it on by default.

.NET Core 1.1 adds compression to the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline using some middleware in the Microsoft.AspNetCore.ResponseCompression package. Let’s look at how to add this to our .NET Core Web API project.

Step 1: Add the Microsoft.AspNetCore.ResponseCompression package

There’s a few different ways to do this – I prefer to add packages from within PowerShell. From within Visual Studio (with my project open), I open a Package Manager Console, and run:

Install-Package Microsoft.AspNetCore.ResponseCompression

(But it’s obviously possible to do this from within the NuGet package manager UI as well)

This will add the package to the Web API project, and you can see this in the project.json file (partially shown below).

{
  "dependencies": {
    "Microsoft.NETCore.App": {
      "version": "1.1.0",
      "type": "platform"
    },
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Routing": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IISIntegration": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.EnvironmentVariables": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.FileExtensions": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Console": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Debug": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Options.ConfigurationExtensions": "1.1.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.ResponseCompression": "1.0.0"
  },
  ...

Step 2: Update and configure services in the project Startup.cs file

We now just need to add a couple of lines to the Startup.cs project file, which will:

• Add the services available to the runtime container, and
• Use the services in the HTTP pipeline at runtime.

I’ve highlighted the lines that I added in bold red font in the code below.

public class Startup
{
    public Startup(IHostingEnvironment env)
    {
        var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder()
            .SetBasePath(env.ContentRootPath)
            .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json", optional: true, reloadOnChange: true)
            .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{env.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true)
            .AddEnvironmentVariables();
        Configuration = builder.Build();
    }
 
    public IConfigurationRoot Configuration { get; }
 
    // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {
        services.AddResponseCompression();
 
        // Add framework services.
        services.AddMvc();
    }
 
    // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to configure the HTTP request pipeline.
    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, ILoggerFactory loggerFactory)
    {
        app.UseResponseCompression();
 
        loggerFactory.AddConsole(Configuration.GetSection("Logging"));
        loggerFactory.AddDebug();
 
        app.UseMvc();
    }
}

Now when I call my web service, all responses are zipped by default.

We can prove this by looking at the headers sent with the response – I’ve pasted a screenshot of the headers sent back when I call a GET method in my Web API service. There is a header named “Content-Encoding” which has the value “gzip” – this signals that the response has been zipped.

Wrapping up

This is a really easy way to improve the performance of your website or your web service – this is one of the first things I configure when starting a new project.