Beware of BrotliStream in .NET Core 2.1
I love compression algorithms and have built a fair share of my own for fun and profit. It is a difficult task to build something that is efficient when it comes to the compromise between speed and compression ratio, so when I saw Google's Brotli algorithm mentioned in the .NET Core 2.1 RC1 announcement , I was estatic! It lasted about 15 minutes until I put the BrotliStream to a test, only to find out that it took 140x longer to compress a 518 MB file! Curious if this was a bug, I delved into the code and realized that the default compression level is set to 11 . For those not familiar with Brotli, that is the highest level available, that prioritize compression ratio above speed. I reported it as an issue , but Microsoft seems to think that having the same configuration as Google's Brotli library is more important than a sane default, so it is only a matter of time before tons of StackOverflow posts popup complaining about the speed of BrotliStream. If you wan...