Posted by Zachary Nado, Software Engineer
Recently we announced
the addition of Brotli compression to the Google AMP Cache. All AMP documents
served from the Google AMP Cache can now be served with Brotli, which will save
a considerable amount of bandwidth for our users and further our goal of
improving the mobile experience.
Brotli
is a newer, more efficient compression algorithm created by Jyrki Alakuijala and
Zoltán Szabadka with the Google Research Europe Compression Team. Launched in
2015, it has already been used to enable considerable
savings in other areas of Google. While it is a generic compression
algorithm, it has particularly impressive performance when applied to web
documents; we have seen an average decrease in document size of around 10% when
using Brotli instead of gzip, which has amounted to hundreds of gigabytes of
bandwidth saved per day across the Google AMP Cache.
With smaller document sizes, pages load faster while also saving bandwidth which
can amount to noticeable savings for users on limited data plans. The Google
AMP Cache is just the beginning though, as engineering teams are working on
Brotli support in many other products which can enable bandwidth savings
throughout Google.
