Enable info/refs gzip decompression in HTTP client

Some HTTP servers try to use gzip compression on the /info/refs
request to save transfer bandwidth. Repositories with many tags
may find the /info/refs request can be gzipped to be 50% of the
original size due to the few but often repeated bytes used (hex
SHA-1 and commonly digits in tag names).

For most HTTP requests enable "Accept-Encoding: gzip" ensuring
the /info/refs payload can use this encoding format.

Only request gzip encoding from servers. Although deflate is
supported by libcurl, most servers have standardized on gzip
encoding for compression as that is what most browsers support.
Asking for deflate increases request sizes by a few bytes, but is
unlikely to ever be used by a server.

Disable the Accept-Encoding header on probe RPCs as response bodies
are supposed to be exactly 4 bytes long, "0000". The HTTP headers
requesting and indicating compression use more space than the data
transferred in the body.

Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/http.c b/http.c
index 9bac1d89fd..345c171c5f 100644
--- a/http.c
+++ b/http.c
@@ -818,6 +818,7 @@ static int http_request(const char *url, void *result, int target, int options)
 
 	curl_easy_setopt(slot->curl, CURLOPT_URL, url);
 	curl_easy_setopt(slot->curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, headers);
+	curl_easy_setopt(slot->curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "gzip");
 
 	if (start_active_slot(slot)) {
 		run_active_slot(slot);