🐛 Bug Report: gzip decompression error on self-hosted Appwrite

[nonisolated]

👟 Reproduction steps

I'm using the Appwrite iOS SDK with my self-hosted Appwrite instance. When fetching documents that result in responses larger than 1024 bytes, the SDK fails with a gzip decompression error. Smaller responses work fine.

👍 Expected behavior

SDK should decompress valid gzip responses from self-hosted Appwrite server.

👎 Actual Behavior

Error
NIOHTTPDecompression.DecompressionError.inflationError(code: -3)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Set up self-hosted Appwrite 1.8.0 with default configuration
2. Create a collection with 3+ documents
3. Fetch documents using iOS SDK:

   let documents = try await databases.listDocuments(
       databaseId: "mydb",
       collectionId: "mycollection"
   )

4. Error occurs when response > 1024 bytes (compression threshold)
5. Works fine with 1-2 documents (no compression)

Workaround

Setting _APP_COMPRESSION_MIN_SIZE_BYTES=10485760 in Appwrite's .env fixes the issue by disabling compression.

Debugging with Claude

I performed extensive debugging with Claude Opus AI assistant to isolate this issue. Here are the results:
Server Response Validation

Test	Result
curl + gunzip decompression	✅ Works
gzip -t validation	✅ Valid gzip
Python gzip module	✅ Works
Python zlib raw inflate	✅ Works
HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 comparison	✅ Identical binary data
Content-Encoding: gzip header	✅ Present
X-Utopia-Compression: true header	✅ Confirms Appwrite compression
AsyncHTTPClient (SDK) decompression	❌ Fails

Conclusion

The server returns perfectly valid gzip data that can be decompressed by curl, gunzip, Python, and other tools. However, AsyncHTTPClient/swift-nio-extras fails to decompress it with Z_DATA_ERROR (-3).
This may be a bug in:

• AsyncHTTPClient HTTP/2 frame handling
• swift-nio-extras NIOHTTPDecompression
• Or an edge case in how these libraries handle gzip from Appwrite

🎲 Appwrite version

Different version (specify in environment)

💻 Operating system

Linux

🧱 Your Environment

• Appwrite Server: 1.8.0 (self-hosted, Docker)
• Appwrite iOS SDK: 13.5.0
• iOS Version: 18.0 / 26.0 beta
• Xcode: 16+
• Tested on: Both Simulator and Physical Device
• Reverse Proxy: Traefik 2.11 (default Appwrite Docker setup)
• Cloudflare: DNS Only mode (no proxy)

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this issue has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

🏢 Have you read the Code of Conduct?

• I have read the Code of Conduct

[ian-naiyas]

I can confirm the above issue and the workaround. My Environment is the same except for being on Server version 1.8.1.

Two additional items:

1. Setting _APP_COMPRESSION_ENABLED to false or disabled has no effect, only the _APP_COMPRESSION_MIN_SIZE_BYTES has an impact. This is because the former is not in the docker-compse.yml file, despite being in the packaged .env file.
2. Leveraging the TablesDB methods produce the same result.

[ChiragAgg5k]

@nonisolated @ian-naiyas thanks for raising this issue, seems like we have 2 problems here -

1. the sdk should properly handle compression
2. fix _APP_COMPRESSION_ENABLED not being in docker-compose file in self hosted

will inform the team and work on fixes asap