NGINX Certificate Compression: RFC 8879 for Every Browser

Technical Briefing: RFC 8879 Certificate Compression in NGINX Problem Statement The TLS 1.3 certificate chain dominates the server's first flight and competes with the initial congestion window and QUIC's 3x amplification limit. RFC 8879 certificate compression shrinks that chain on every fresh handshake — a tested production chain dropped from 4735 to 3750 bytes (20.8% saving). NGINX supports this via a single directive: nginx sslcertificatecompression on; It is valid in http, server, and stre…