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.