https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17321131/compression-filter-for-web-api/17331627#17331627 I think you should not do this in an action filter as the modelbinding stage happens before action filters are executed and during modelbinding the formatters could be reading the stream to deserialize it, in which case it would fail. If you are using IIS, then do the following to setup compression(The following have some snippets from Scott Hanselman’s blog post): Enabled the “Dynamic Compression” feature in IIS. Back