The challenges of improving performance in a complex environment
Brotli is a lossless compression algorithm, designed and released by Google for use on the web. By mid-2016, Chrome and Firefox both supported brotli. There are a few other encodings available with HTTP, but the most well-known and widely-deployed to that point was gzip. Based on benchmarks and blog posts out in the wild, brotli is able to get text-like payloads (HTML, Javascript, CSS) about 5–15% smaller than the gzipped size, and it’s not especially slower or more resource-intensive during decompression.
Despite its strengths, our deployment of brotli has been quite challenging. When we enabled brotli in a straightforward manner…
