Brotli is a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. It is similar in speed with deflate but offers more dense compression.
Since September 2015, google was announced their new compression algorithm (called Brotli). Even it was a new compression, most modern browser was support it.
Why brotli was awesome?
Like gzip (well-known content-encoding), brotli was awesome (at the moment) and cloudflare was experiment with it. Based on personal test, brotli was optimized on dynamic content and specific mime-types (eg. text/html, application/json, and another dynamic content), but brotli still support another types (since they use brotli_types *)
Static files (eg. jpeg, jpg, png, webp, gif, etc) aren’t optimized (maybe, not yet optimized by brotli?).
Testbed
Server Hardware
- 1 x Intel x3430
- 4 x 4GB DDR3 Memory
- 4 x 76GB SCSI/SAS Harddrive (RAID-10)
Server Software
- Linux Cent OS 7 x86_64
- Nginx 1.11.4 + ngx_brotli module + http2 + openssl-1.0.2j (ALPN)
- google/brotli library
Client Hardware
- Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4200M
- 2 x 4GB DDR3 Memory
- 1 x 500GB 5400RPM SATA
Client Software
- Google Chrome Version 53.0.2785.143 (64-bit)
Test Method
gzip compression level: 6/9 (default 1)
brotli compression level: 9/11 (default 6)
Default Landing Pages Nginx (612bytes)
with gzip: 518 bytes
with brotli: 425 bytes
Dummy json file (9,5KBytes)
with gzip: 3,0Kbytes
with brotli: 2,8Kbytes
Result
Brotli compression do better than gzip (on max compression level), but since brotli isn’t yet RFC Standards (still draft), I would not recommend deploy it on production state (but if you know and can handle the risk, it’s worthed). Unfortunately, brotli won’t work on HTTP connection (it means that you need TLS configuration on your webserver).
Brotli Library for Cent OS 7
You can use pre-compiled library for Cent OS 7 to install ngx_brotli module for nginx.
libbrotli-devel-1.0-1.git5ce9bf1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
libbrotlidec1-1.0-1.git5ce9bf1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
libbrotlienc1-1.0-1.git5ce9bf1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm
Interesting to join the projects? :-)
