Saving bandwidth with Zopfli

Today Jeff Atwood published the article Zopfli Optimization: Literally Free Bandwidth, praising the compression algorithm Zopfli. Zopfli was created by Google and published in 2013:

The Zopfli Compression Algorithm is a new open sourced general purpose data compression library that got its name from a Swiss bread recipe. It is an implementation of the Deflate compression algorithm that creates a smaller output size compared to previous techniques. […]

The output generated by Zopfli is typically 3–8% smaller compared to zlib at maximum compression, and we believe that Zopfli represents the state of the art in Deflate-compatible compression. Zopfli is written in C for portability. It is a compression-only library; existing software can decompress the data. Zopfli is bit-stream compatible with compression used in gzip, Zip, PNG, HTTP requests, and others.

Jeff gave Zopfli a try and got impressive results:

In my testing, Zopfli reliably produces 3 to 8 percent smaller PNG images than even the mighty PNGout, which is an incredible feat.

However, Zopfli has one drawback. Its awesome compression ratio comes with a speed penalty, it’s more than 80 times slower than gzip.

Because of its slowness Zopfli is not the best choice for compression at runtime. But where it really shines is when it’s used for pre-compressed data. A very good candidate are PNG encoded images. There’s even a Zopfli encoder for that purpose, ZopfliPNG.

So because of the proclaimed reduction of the size of PNGs, I gave ZopfliPNG a try. First I measured the current size of all PNG images of my site with this PowerShell command:

PS> gci *.png -Recurse | Measure-Object -Sum Length

Count    : 110
Average  :
Sum      : 4775284
Maximum  :
Minimum  :
Property : Length

That’s about 4.6 MiB of PNGs. Than I let ZopfliPNG re-compress all these files:

gci *.png -Recurse | %{ zopflipng.exe -y --lossy_transparent $_.FullName $_.FullName }

A few minutes and 110 files later the command has finished. 56 files have been changed, i.e. ZopfliPNG was able to produce a smaller size for more than half of all images.

The entire size of all PNGs is now this:

PS> gci *.png -Recurse | Measure-Object -Sum Length

Count    : 110
Average  :
Sum      : 3616048
Maximum  :
Minimum  :
Property : Length

So from the former 4.6 MiB it went down to 3.4 MiB, that’s a reduction by 26 percent. Quite impressive for just changing the compression algorithm.