Flywheel: Google’s Data Compression Proxy for the Mobile Web
Abstract
Mobile devices are increasingly the dominant Internet
access technology. Nevertheless, high costs, data caps,
and throttling are a source of widespread frustration, and
a significant barrier to adoption in emerging markets.
This paper presents Flywheel, an HTTP proxy service
that extends the life of mobile data plans by compressing
responses in-flight between origin servers and client
browsers. Flywheel is integrated with the Chrome web
browser and reduces the size of proxied web pages by
50% for a median user. We report measurement results
from millions of users as well as experience gained during
three years of operating and evolving the production
service at Google.
Research Areas
