If you need to answer such questions as

• Is my client correctly indicating that it can handle gzip-compressed responses?
• Is my Beanstalk-hosted webapp providing gzip-compressed responses?

then you may have no choice but to monitor packet traffic on the Beanstalk side, especially if your client is running on a mobile OS.

How can one do this? Let’s take the most difficult case and assume the only machine you have for development work runs Windows:

1. If you didn’t associate a keypair .pem file when launching your Beanstalk environment, then create a new environment that does have such an association.
2. On your Windows client machine, install VMWare Player 6+ and download an ISO for Ubuntu 13+
3. Using Player, create a virtual Ubuntu desktop. You’ll also want to install VMWare Tools, which can be tricky: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/11287/how-to-run-ubuntu-in-windows-7-with-vmware-player/
4. In Player, go to Player | Manage | Virtual Machine Settings | Options | Shared Folders | set to “Always enabled” and add the folder containing your keypair pem file
5. In Ubuntu’s dock, select Ubuntu Software Manager, type Wireshark into the search box, and install it
6. In Ubuntu, open a terminal (e.g. via Ctrl + Alt + T)
7. You should see the folder containing your pem file if you do
   

   ls -l /mnt/hgfs

   Sometimes even after you’ve installed VMWareTools, it still fails to access the shared folder. In this case, I’ve tried reinstalling this way:

   sudo ./Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

   Let’s assume it worked and the full path is /mnt/hgfs/Projects/bs-david.pem

8. Look in your EC2 console for the Public DNS of your instance. Let’s assume it’s ec2-99-99-99-99.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com
   1. If you aren’t sure which ec2 instance your beanstalk instance is running on, go to console.aws.amazon.com | Service = ElasticBeanstalk | Application = your app | Configuration / Edit button | Instances / gear icon | Custom AMI ID. Note down this ID.
   2. Go to Service = EC2 | Running Instances, and find the ID under the AMI ID column. Click in the Name cell of this row.
   3. The Public DNS of this instance will be listed under the Description tab (and immediately above the tabs).
9. First, verify that ssh can connect. In the Ubuntu terminal, enter
   

   ssh -t -i /mnt/hgfs/Projects/bs-david.pem ec2-user@ec2-99-99-99-99.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com

   If that doesn’t work, it might be that your network blocks the port your SSH is trying to use. I have to switch from my office’s Ethernet to its wifi.

10. If you succeeded, the prompt should now be [ec2-user@ip-99-99-99-99 ~]
11. At the ec2 prompt, enter
    

    sudo tcpdump -i eth0 -s 65535 -w test.pcap

12. If you succeeded, the terminal should show tcpdump: listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes and then suspend to capture the packet traffic
13. Using your client, send some of the requests you want to investigate. When you’re done, do Ctrl + C in the terminal
14. Type
    

    ls -l test.pcap

    to ensure the file exists and is nonempty

15. Move the pcap file from EC2 to the Ubuntu desktop by logging out of the ec2 instance and then using scp to fetch the file
    

    exit
scp -i /mnt/hgfs/Projects/bs-david.pem ec2-user@ec2-99-99-99-99.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com:test.pcap .

    Take note of the dot at the end, indicating you want to save the remote file to the current local directory.

16. If you succeeded, you should see running updates like this: test.pcap 100% 16MB 203.8KB/s 01:18
17. Verify that the file was transferred fully by typing
    

    ls -l test.pcap

    The file size should be the same as that reported by ls when you ran it on the ec2 instance.

18. Load the pcap file into wireshark by typing
    

    wireshark -r test.pcap &

19. In wireshark near the right end of the toolbar, tap the “Edit/apply display filter…” button. In the dialog that pops up, scroll down in the Display Filter list, select “http”, and click OK.
20. Back in the main wireshark window, the second pane from the top should now show a turnkey for Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
21. In the top pane, select the row indicating the request or response you’re interested in. Then in the second pane, open the http turnkey.
22. For the particular scenario of checking that gzip-compression is happening, the client GETs should include “gzip” without quotes among the values of Accept-Encoding, and the server responses must have http response code 200, the Content-Type must not be text/plain, and the body shown at the right end of the third pane should not be comprehensible.

StackOverflow describes an alternative method that works even when you don’t have access to the server, if you can direct the mobile client to use your workstation as a wifi access point.