The Jetty GzipHandler is a compression handler that you can apply to any dynamic resource (servlet). It fixes many of the bugs in commonly available compression filters: it works with asynchronous servlets; it handles all ways to set content length. It has been tested with Jetty continuations and suspending requests. Some user-agents might be excluded from compression to avoid common browser bugs (yes, this means IE!).

The GzipHandler is added to the entire server by the etc/jetty-gzip.xml file from the gzip.mod module. It may also be added to individual contexts in a context xml file.

GzipHandler will gzip or deflate the content of a response if:

If both gzip and deflate are specified in the accept-encoding header, then gzip will be used.

Compressing the content can greatly improve the network bandwidth usage, but at the cost of memory and CPU cycles. The DefaultServlet is capable of serving pre-compressed static content, which saves memory and CPU. By default, the GzipHandler will check to see if pre-compressed content exists, and pass the request through to be handled by the DefaultServlet.