Brotli is an open-source, lossless data compression algorithm that has a higher compression rate than most other methods, like gzip.

How it works

With Brotli Support enabled, the CDN serves Brotli-compressed assets from your origin server and caches them on ​Akamai​ edge servers. If a requesting client like a browser doesn't support Brotli, the edge servers respond with non-Brotli resources.

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Brotli Support doesn't compress resources within the ​Akamai​ CDN in real-time. You need to set up Brotli compression separately on your origin server.

​Akamai​ edge servers send Brotli-compressed content to clients accepting the Brotli algorithm if either of these conditions is met:

• A request comes from a client that accepts Brotli-compression. A request fielded by an edge server contains the Accept-encoding header that includes the br value.

• There's already Brotli-compressed content in their cache.

If the client accepts the Brotli algorithm, but a gzip-compressed version of the requested content is already cached on the ​Akamai​ edge server, the gzip resource is served to save time and bandwidth. If this is the case, you'll need to wait until the time-to-live (TTL) expires on the cached gzip content, before Brotli Support is applied. Once a Brotli-compressed asset is in cache, the CDN serves it to clients that support Brotli.