Scenario: A Citrix Administrator installed the compression feature on the web servers. To offload the compression on the Citrix ADC, the…

The administrator has correctly configured a rewrite policy to remove the Accept-Encoding header from requests sent to the backend servers. This action successfully prevents the servers from compressing responses. However, this step only prepares the environment for Citrix ADC to handle compression; it does not, by itself, enable or trigger compression on the ADC. For the ADC to compress traffic, a compression policy must be created and bound to a virtual server (or globally). This policy defines which traffic should be compressed. The observed issue—data not being compressed by the ADC—directly indicates that the corresponding compression policy is likely missing, has an incorrect expression, or is not bound correctly.

A. The rewrite policy is bound at an incorrect bind point: This is incorrect because the scenario explicitly states that the ‘Accept-Encoding’ header is being removed, which confirms the rewrite policy is functioning as intended.
B. The servers are automatically compressing all responses: This is unlikely, as the removal of the ‘Accept-Encoding’ header is the standard method to signal servers not to compress content.
D. Servercmp is disabled on the Citrix ADC: While disabling the global compression feature would cause this symptom, "Servercmp" is not the correct feature name. More importantly, a misconfigured policy is a more specific and common operational error than the entire feature being disabled.

1. Citrix Official Documentation - Compression: "To configure compression on the Citrix ADC appliance

you first enable compression. Then you create compression policies and bind them to a virtual server or bind point to specify the traffic that you want to compress." This confirms that enabling the feature is not sufficient; a correctly configured and bound policy is required to trigger compression.

Source: Citrix ADC 13.0 Product Documentation

"Compression

" Section: "Configuring compression."

2. Citrix Official Documentation - Offloading Compression from a Web Server: "If you want the Citrix ADC appliance to perform compression instead of your web server

you must configure the appliance to remove the Accept-Encoding header from requests that it forwards to the server. [...] You must also configure compression policies and bind them to your virtual servers..." This source directly addresses the scenario

showing that both the rewrite action (removing the header) and configuring compression policies are necessary steps. The administrator in the scenario has only completed the first part.

Source: Citrix ADC 13.0 Product Documentation

"Compression

" Section: "Use Cases for Content Compression

" Subsection: "Offloading Compression from a Web Server."