MyBB Community Forums

For users with dialup, GZip Page Compression gives faster download times.
For users with modern high-speed, GZip "increases the load on both the host and client computers, without saving much download time."

Do you advise using GZip Page Compression?

If you are targeting people with dial-up connections the answer is obvious.
What if you want to be 'user-friendly' for everyone, and also not stress out your shared hosting server?

If you do use GZip what setting do you choose?
Anyone have advice??

I suggest enabling GZip with a compression level between 1-4. The most compression occurs in the first few passes, and if you set it all the way to 9, you don't save that much more bandwidth, but you use a lot more CPU.

I have mod_deflate enabled. But whether to use GZip or not, I'd generally use it (well, I do have a slow connection myself).

GZip will increase load for the server mainly (decompression is very fast, so for the client, it's pretty much insignificant, especially comparing to the amount of processing power reequired to render the page). So if you're focusing on user experience, just leave it enabled.

You guys are great, thanks again.