Flywheel: Google's data compression proxy for the mobile web
Victor Agababov, Michael Buettner, Victor Chudnovsky, Mark Cogan, Ben Greenstein, Shane McDaniel, Michael Piatek, Colin Scott, Matt Welsh, Bolian Yin · 2015
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 compress-ing 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 dur-ing three years of operating and evolving the production service at Google. 1