Bread time

As my server was hitting its capacity limits, it was time to rethink the whole webstack and do some improvements. And that’s exactly where I ditched gzip in favor of Brotli.

Considering that it’s supported by the major browsers, I checked my Matomo analysis to see if I would run into any problems. As I had almost no visitors running old versions of IE, I decided to switch. All I had to do was exchanging the gzip params with the ones of Brotli which are as follows:

brotli on; brotli_comp_level 5; brotli_static on; brotli_types

text/xml image/svg+xml application/x-font-ttf image/vnd.microsoft.icon application/x-font-opentype application/json font/eot application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/javascript font/otf application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript application/x-javascript text/plain application/x-font-truetype application/xml+rss image/x-icon font/opentype text/css image/x-win-bitmap;

All I had to do then was compiling the module and restarting nginx. My tests gave me a saving of 10-20% in terms of page sizes. Now that’s what I call a success.