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Specifically I am working with IIS7, in case there are platform specific reasons, but I am curious in general.

I know gzip compression is more CPU intensive for both the server and the client, but it seems like the trade off for lower bandwidth would be overall a positive change since so much web content is highly compressable (thinking of HTML, CSS, and JS).

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@awoodland you're right, that does make more sense :) Should I delete and repost, or let the move-post gods do their handy work? – CoolUserName Aug 19 '11 at 18:45
It's only one vote away from moving now, I think it would be better if it was moved so that Christian's answer doesn't get lost. I think you could flag and ask for it to be moved although I've already done that now. – awoodland Aug 19 '11 at 18:46
P.S. There's loads of other interesting Q&A sites in the network - stackexchange.com/sites – awoodland Aug 19 '11 at 18:49
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 19 '11 at 18:51

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2 Answers

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Compressing web content (via deflate or gzip) is a trade-off between CPU and bandwidth.

Generally speaking, the relatively low CPU investment in compression of the files is going to be of little to no impact; unless CPU is your bottleneck at all times (and, really, even if it is), compression is unlikely to have any tangible negative.

The positive is, of course, bandwidth freed up; while some content will compress much better than others, and some not at all, there's going to be at least a marginal reduction in bandwidth consumption with compression enabled.

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Not only is bandwidth freed up, page load times are faster :) – Antoine Benkemoun Aug 19 '11 at 19:47
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If files are sufficiently small gzipping them may be slower than sending them uncompressed.

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