Use native brotli package?

[nickchomey]

I see that this uses a brotli package, but I just came across this Golang native brotli package that claims to perform much better than the other ones. Perhaps it's worth evaluating?

https://github.com/molecule-man/go-brrr

Here's a blog post where the author showed the great lengths they went to to optimize it. https://blog.andr2i.com/posts/2026-05-03-notes-from-optimizing-cpu-bound-go-hot-paths

[henderkes]

Seems interesting, but I don't see a reason to switch.

• zstd is preferred by clients in general
• we use cbrotli, which is still as-fast-as in what we use it for
• we must link against C anyways to embed php

Something that would make more sense would be a cgo zstd library to override caddy's built-in one. Compression is actually part of the hot path in terms if cpu time, so if we could keep default compression but free up cpu (and gc) with an efficient native implementation, it would be good.

[dunglas]

I agree with @henderkes, however upstream Caddy may be interested by native Brotli support.

[nickchomey]

Fair enough! Feel free to close this

[henderkes]

I actually like Kévins idea. Would you mind pitching it to the Caddy repo?

[nickchomey]

Looks like they're not particularly interested - would first want to see it as a 3rd party module, testing, benchmarking etc. Which is quite fair. Perhaps someone will try to do all of that.