Gzip was leaving 20% on the table

Gzip was leaving 20% on the table

A documentation site in Tokyo served 800 KB of HTML and JSON per page, gzipped to 180 KB at origin. Fine, except origin spent CPU compressing the same uncacheable-feeling responses repeatedly, and gzip is no longer the best tool.

We moved compression to the edge and switched to Brotli at level 11 for cached text assets. The edge compresses each object once on cache fill, stores the compressed copy, and serves it to every client that advertises br. Origin stopped compressing entirely.

Text payloads shrank another 21% versus gzip, 180 KB down to 142 KB. Origin CPU dropped because compression left the hot path. On slow mobile links across Southeast Asia, page transfer time fell measurably, and the saved bytes added up to about 600 GB of egress a month.

The number that mattered: 21% smaller than gzip, compressed once at the edge.