From 3dc962b30138f58f590638ae2b703a22e89c5423 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Julien Voisin <jvoisin@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Sat, 30 May 2026 06:52:37 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] perf(internal/gzip): pool *gzip.Writer per middleware
 instance (#1654)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

gzip.NewWriterLevel allocates fresh deflate window and hash table
buffers (~1.18 MiB) on every request. This commit pools them in a closure-local
sync.Pool so each middleware instance reuses its writers.

The level is validated once at setup (NewWriterLevel against
io.Discard); pooled writers are reset to io.Discard on Put so the
pool doesn't pin response writers between requests.

Only call site is RenderIndex (lib/http.go), which serves the
challenge page, so this directly cuts the per-challenge allocation
footprint.

I benchmarked the change using the following benchmark,
put in the commit message instead of in a file since it's pretty much useless
outside of this particular change.

```
package internal

import (
	"io"
	"net/http"
	"net/http/httptest"
	"testing"
)

func BenchmarkGzipMiddleware(b *testing.B) {
	payload := make([]byte, 4096)
	for i := range payload {
		payload[i] = byte(i)
	}

	inner := http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		w.Write(payload)
	})
	h := GzipMiddleware(1, inner)

	b.ReportAllocs()
	b.RunParallel(func(pb *testing.PB) {
		req := httptest.NewRequest(http.MethodGet, "/", nil)
		req.Header.Set("Accept-Encoding", "gzip")
		for pb.Next() {
			rec := httptest.NewRecorder()
			h.ServeHTTP(rec, req)
			io.Copy(io.Discard, rec.Body)
		}
	})
}
```

The results are pretty nice:

Benchmarks (Linux arm64, count=10, benchstat, vs origin/main):

  GzipMiddleware-8  sec/op     158.8µs ± 4%  ->   5.2µs ± 3%  -96.72% (p=0.000)
  GzipMiddleware-8  B/op       1180.6 KiB    ->   1.9 KiB     -99.84% (p=0.000)
  GzipMiddleware-8  allocs/op  32            ->  13           -59.38% (p=0.000)

Signed-off-by: jvoisin <julien.voisin@dustri.org>
---
 docs/docs/CHANGELOG.md |  1 +
 internal/gzip.go       | 29 ++++++++++++++++++++++++-----
 2 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/docs/docs/CHANGELOG.md b/docs/docs/CHANGELOG.md
index cf766d4e..645369fd 100644
--- a/docs/docs/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/docs/docs/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -39,6 +39,7 @@ and this project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0
 - Fix a race in the bbolt store where the asynchronous cleanup scheduled by an expired read could delete a value that had just been refreshed; the delete now only fires when the key still carries the same expired generation it observed.
 - Marginally increase the performances of requests processing
 - Marginally improve the performances of PoW validation
+- Significantly improve the performances of the gzip middleware
 
 ## v1.25.0: Necron
 
diff --git a/internal/gzip.go b/internal/gzip.go
index c83a0edf..e9ecdb9d 100644
--- a/internal/gzip.go
+++ b/internal/gzip.go
@@ -2,11 +2,28 @@ package internal
 
 import (
 	"compress/gzip"
+	"io"
 	"net/http"
 	"strings"
+	"sync"
 )
 
 func GzipMiddleware(level int, next http.Handler) http.Handler {
+	// Validate the level once at setup; gzip.NewWriterLevel only fails for
+	// invalid levels and we'd rather panic now than mid-request.
+	if _, err := gzip.NewWriterLevel(io.Discard, level); err != nil {
+		panic(err)
+	}
+
+	// Per-middleware pool of *gzip.Writer. Each entry carries ~40 KiB of
+	// deflate buffers; reusing them avoids that allocation on every request.
+	pool := sync.Pool{
+		New: func() any {
+			gz, _ := gzip.NewWriterLevel(io.Discard, level)
+			return gz
+		},
+	}
+
 	return http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
 		if !strings.Contains(r.Header.Get("Accept-Encoding"), "gzip") {
 			next.ServeHTTP(w, r)
@@ -14,11 +31,13 @@ func GzipMiddleware(level int, next http.Handler) http.Handler {
 		}
 
 		w.Header().Set("Content-Encoding", "gzip")
-		gz, err := gzip.NewWriterLevel(w, level)
-		if err != nil {
-			panic(err)
-		}
-		defer gz.Close()
+		gz := pool.Get().(*gzip.Writer)
+		gz.Reset(w)
+		defer func() {
+			gz.Close()
+			gz.Reset(io.Discard)
+			pool.Put(gz)
+		}()
 
 		grw := gzipResponseWriter{ResponseWriter: w, sink: gz}
 		next.ServeHTTP(grw, r)