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Compression reduces bandwidth requirements and can significantly improve server responsiveness in bandwidth-constrained setups. The compression policies are associated with services bound to the virtual server. The policies determine whether a response can be compressed and send compressible content to the target connector, which compresses it and sends it to the client.

If you enable the Compression feature, the target connector intercepts requests from clients and determines whether the client can accept compressed content. After receiving the HTTP response from the server, the connector examines the content to determine whether it is compressible. If the content is compressible, the compresses it, modifies the response header to indicate the type of compression performed, and forwards the compressed content to the client.

The real test of the effectiveness of the compression feature lies in how much data is compressed and how much bandwidth is saved in the process. Besides the compression algorithm employed, when compression occurs and what type of data is compressed also influence how compression is performed and how beneficial it really is. Moreover, errors encountered when decompressing data also serve as factors impacting user-perception on compression and its usefulness. Using the CtxGwCompressTest, administrators can accurately assess the effectiveness of the compression feature, keep a close watch on all factors influencing compression, and understand how these parameters can be fine-tuned to improve compression ratios and increase bandwidth savings.

Outputs of the test :One set of results for the Citrix Cloud Connector Gateway to be monitored.

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Compression_ratio	Indicates the ratio of the compressible data received from the server to the compressed data sent to the client.	Percent	Compression ratio depends on the types of files in the responses, but is always significant, noticeably reducing the amount of data transmitted over the network. The higher the compression ratio, the greater the bandwidth savings! This is why, a value close to 100% for this measure is indicative of a very effective compression mechanism, which is bound to result in significant savings in bandwidth usage. On the other hand, a very low value for this measure indicates that only a small amount of the compressible data has been successfully compressed, thus resulting in poor bandwidth savings.
Tot_compression_ratio	Indicates the ratio of total data received to total data transmitted.	Percent	The value of this measure indicates what percentage of data has been compressed. A high value is hence desired for this measure.