Enabling compression at the web/HTTP server tier comes at the highest recommendation of Oracle. Particularly, this configuration solves a problem inherent in Internet Explorer browsers. This compression configuration exponentially optimizes response times from requests sent to the Oracle BI server and should be conducted in every environment in which you wish to install Oracle BI 12c, but especially in Oracle BI 11g if you still need to use that legacy environment.
All major HTTP servers have the ability to cache static files and compress files and data traffic over the network to expedite responses to user requests flowing through the Oracle BI system.
Compression reduces the size of transmitted data. Nginx does not compress data that has already been compressed. And the compression happens at runtime, which increases potentially the processing overhead on the server. But with a beefy server with plenty of processor capacity, compression will be the icing on the cake for your BI users:
- Open the
nginx.confonce more and prepare to edit the file in the next steps. - Add the following two lines of code inside the
server {section you added in the previous section directly after the line,server_name localhost:gzip on; gunzip on;
- Save the file: the content excerpt you've been updating should now look similar to the following screenshot:
- Execute again from the command line the reload command for
nginx:nginx.exe -s reload
- Refresh the browser page you previously accessed for the /analytics portal and you will most likely notice no material difference in speed right away. But just know it is there and ready to help your Oracle BI system handle more concurrent user requests than it did before.
If you are really curious about the compression modification, we suggest you look at a couple of different things. First, read more about the use and recommendation of compression via HTTP servers (IIS, Apache, NGINX, and so on) in Oracle Support ID 1333049.1 and how compression solves an issue that still exists with Internet Explorer 8/9 browsers. Second, if prior to configuring the gzip and gunzip option, you were to use any of the web traffic analyzer tools such as Firebug for Firefox or Developer Tools for Chrome browsers, you would see that prior to the setting the following screenshot under Response Headers states the server is nginx/1.11.10, but there is no Content-Encoding attribute:
After the compression setting, you can see that, under Response Headers, the Content-Encoding is now set to gzip, showing that compression is turned on:
