Brotli vs. gzip at the edge: a Buenos Aires news site shaves payload

Brotli vs. gzip at the edge: a Buenos Aires news site shaves payload
A news portal served gzip-compressed HTML and JSON. Solid, but their article pages ran 180KB of markup, and readers on patchy Buenos Aires mobile felt every kilobyte.
They enabled Brotli at the edge at quality level 11 for static assets — pre-compressed once at build, served from cache. HTML dropped from 180KB gzipped to 141KB.
Then they tried Brotli-11 on dynamic API responses too and latency rose: level-11 encode is slow per request, adding 30ms to uncacheable JSON.
So they split it: Brotli-11 for cacheable static text, Brotli-5 for dynamic responses where encode speed matters more than the last few bytes.
Median page transfer fell 22%. Dynamic response latency stayed flat.
The number that mattered: 141KB articles, down from 180KB.