How to Improve Rails Caching with Brotli Compression

[pawurb]

https://pawelurbanek.com/rails-brotli-cache

[jonathanhefner]

Upcoming in Rails 7.1, you can specify a custom compressor for your cache, out of the box. See the `:compressor` option of `ActiveSupport::Cache::Store.new`:

https://api.rubyonrails.org/v7.1/classes/ActiveSupport/Cache...

[booleanbetrayal → jonathanhefner]

Thanks for this. Will likely defer until this lands, but looking forward to trying out Brotli and Zstd for this use case!

[pawurb → jonathanhefner]

Thanks, I wasn't sure when it will be live. I'll update the post to reflect it.

[out_of_protocol]

If that compression is internal-only, i'd start looking at zstd, which is much better at both speed and compression level

[e12e → out_of_protocol]

From TFA:

> Optionally, you can hook up a custom compression algorithm. For example, Google Snappy offers even better performance than Brotli for the cost of worse compression ratios. ZSTD by Facebook is also worth checking out.

(...)

> The great news is that support for custom cache compression algorithms has recently been merged into the Rails main branch. But it may take a while before it’s available in a production Rails release.

[pawurb → out_of_protocol]

Thanks for suggestion. Gem supports custom compression algorithms. I'll try to add more compression types to the benchmarks.

[out_of_protocol → pawurb]

Note zstd can be fine-tuned to almost any ratio between performance and compression, worth trying multiple different settings

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/facebook/zstd/v1.3.4/doc/i...

[miohtama]

Important to understand about Brotli vs. other compression is that Brotli has been pretrained with HTML/CSS/JS code. It efficiently compresses English text and source code, especially small files, due to its static dictionary.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/font-compression-...

There are other factors that make Brotli good, but this is good to understand when dealing with web frontends.