Hacker News Reader

> Flywheel compresses all text responses using GZip.

Since this is for Chrome only, I'm surprised they don't use the other possible compression format: zlib (confusingly named deflate in the RFC). It's 12 bytes less and uses a faster to compute ADLER32 checksum, compared to CRC32 in gzip.

View on HN

> For example, measurements of Flywheel’s workload show that 42% of HTML bytes on the web that would benefit from compression are uncompressed, > despite GZip being universally supported in modern web browsers [13]. This is in part because GZip is not enabled by default on most web servers, > yet only a single-line change to the server configuration is needed.

So really, it's a gzipping proxy written in Go. Hopefully they extend the protocol to better compression in future.

The proxy does much more than just gzip; this paragraph refers to only the impact of gzip on the Web (which was surprising to us given how widespread we assumed it would be).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com