Investigate compressing TS Server socket communication

Problem

On desktop, TS Server uses a json based protocol. This protocol up being quite verbose for larger documents, especially for requests such as navTree which return results from the entire file

Just opening checker.ts for example results in individual requests and responses that are a few MB in size.

Proposal

We’ve seen up to a 10x reduction of on the wire data by enabling websocket per-message compression for VS Code’s internal communications. We aren’t using web sockets here, but I believe we should be able to fairly easily compress individual messages on the server side and decompress them on the editor side. Most importantly, we could enable this without any changes to the json protocol itself.

For backwards compatibility, this would have to be an opt-in feature

[amcasey]

I wonder if there’s an intermediate approach where only the body property of the response is compressed? That might make it easier for the server to decide per-message whether compression is worthwhile (assuming the client has opted in via user-preference).

[Kingwl]

would require a Accept-Encoding header in the request.

Seems we are repeating http protocol. :XD.

Another problem is TypeScript does not have external dependency (If i’m correct). So will we add something (for gzip) dependency, or just implement yet another compressor?