setting 'Content-Encoding' to gzip or deflate causes java.net.SocketException: Connection reset

Question

I have developed a simple Java Servlet in order to retrieve a medical file(DICOM) from a server:

public class DicomRetrieveServlet extends HttpServlet {

private static Logger log = Logger.getLogger(DicomRetrieveServlet.class);

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
    String dicomFilepath = "PATH TO MY FILE";

    InputStream resultInStream = null;
    response.setHeader("Accept-Ranges","bytes");
    response.setHeader("Vary", "Accept-Encoding");
    response.setHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip");
    response.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin","*");
    response.setContentType("application/dicom");

    try (OutputStream out = response.getOutputStream()) {
        int bytes_read;
        resultInStream = new FileInputStream(dicomFilepath.toString());
        byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
        while ((bytes_read = resultInStream.read(buffer)) != -1) {
            out.write(buffer, 0, bytes_read);
        }
        out.flush();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        log.error("Error while streaming DICOM image ", e);
    }
}

If I comment this line:

        response.setHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip");

the servlet works fine, but adding the above line would cause:

org.apache.catalina.connector.ClientAbortException: java.net.SocketException: Connection reset
at org.apache.catalina.connector.OutputBuffer.doFlush(OutputBuffer.java:367)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.OutputBuffer.flush(OutputBuffer.java:331)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteOutputStream.flush(CoyoteOutputStream.java:101)
at pages.DicomRetrieveServlet.doGet(DicomRetrieveServlet.java:107)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:624)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:731)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:303)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:208)
at org.apache.tomcat.websocket.server.WsFilter.doFilter(WsFilter.java:52)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:241)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:208)
at org.apache.catalina.filters.CorsFilter.handleNonCORS(CorsFilter.java:438)
at org.apache.catalina.filters.CorsFilter.doFilter(CorsFilter.java:179)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:241)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:208)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:220)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:122)
at org.apache.catalina.authenticator.AuthenticatorBase.invoke(AuthenticatorBase.java:505)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:170)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:103)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve.invoke(AccessLogValve.java:957)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:116)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:423)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.AbstractHttp11Processor.process(AbstractHttp11Processor.java:1079)
at org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol$AbstractConnectionHandler.process(AbstractProtocol.java:620)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$SocketProcessor.run(JIoEndpoint.java:316)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1142)
at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:617)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.TaskThread$WrappingRunnable.run(TaskThread.java:61)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)
Caused by: java.net.SocketException: Connection reset
at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite(SocketOutputStream.java:113)
at java.net.SocketOutputStream.write(SocketOutputStream.java:153)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.InternalOutputBuffer.realWriteBytes(InternalOutputBuffer.java:215)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.ByteChunk.flushBuffer(ByteChunk.java:480)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.InternalOutputBuffer.flush(InternalOutputBuffer.java:119)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.AbstractHttp11Processor.action(AbstractHttp11Processor.java:801)
at org.apache.coyote.Response.action(Response.java:172)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.OutputBuffer.doFlush(OutputBuffer.java:363)
... 29 more

for some reasons I want to simulate an other server behavior which has below HTTP Response Header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:13:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
Last-Modified: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 18:40:46 GMT
ETag: "14034f-8257c-4f67834a723b4"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Content-Type: application/dicom

And these are Http Request Headers:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.86 Safari/537.36
X-DevTools-Emulate-Network-Conditions-Client-Id: 922810C0-22E8-4F8A-8E15-894B36DAB06A
Accept: '*/*'
Referer: http://localhost:8080/myapp/viewImageCornerStone.jsf?studyUID=1.2.410.200028.456.20151027.10647
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,fa;q=0.6
Cookie: JSESSIONID=FABFF5F057EE4786E2920E5DFA47376C

I am using 'jdk1.8.0_77' and 'apache-tomcat-7.0.62'.
Any help would be appreciated.

Neary

What are the headers of the incoming request? Perhaps the client doesn't support gzip? – Zebrass

Dear @Hok, I have added the incoming request header to the question. – Neary

Is the data that you're sending in GZIP format? This is the only question. – Sorely

Answer 1

Thank you dear @EJP for your useful comment, The gzip Filter did not effect my Servlet, so the content was not realy in GZIP format and adding the wrong content-encoding caused the mentioned exception.

I removed this wrong statement:

response.setHeader("Content-Encoding","gzip");

And I have added my servlet url to the GZIP Filter url pattern. Now the response Header is in good shape:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=1.2.410.200028.456.20151027.10647.1.1.dcm
Content-Type: application/dicom
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Date: Mon, 02 May 2016 12:54:45 GM

Neary

Please @Kayvan, what do you mean by : 'And I have added my servlet url to the GZIP Filter url pattern. Now the response Header is in good shape' – Lichtenfeld

I meant the gzipFilter in the web.xml <filter-mapping> tag. @Lichtenfeld – Neary