How to compress http request on the fly and without loading compressed buffer in memory

Question

I need to send voluminous data in a http post request to a server supporting gziped encoded requests.

Starting from a simple

public async Task

        

Answer 1

Try using the CompressedContent class from WebAPIContrib https://github.com/WebApiContrib/WebAPIContrib/blob/master/src/WebApiContrib/Content/CompressedContent.cs

public async Task<string> DoPost(HttpContent content)
{
  HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
  HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync("http://myUri", 
                                 new CompressedContent(content,"gzip"));

  response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
  return await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
}

P.S. that this will only stream the content on .net 4.5. The .net 4 version of HttpWebRequest always buffers sent content.

P.P.S. Creating a new HttpClient for each request is not the best way to use HttpClient. Doing this will force a new TCP connection to be created for each request.