AMP Compression Update

June 06, 2017


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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.