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Comment by santiagobasulto | Hacker News Reader

> the load on my server is reduced

isn't this the opposite? Enabling compression will INCREASE the load on your server as you need more CPU to compress/decompress the data.

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As Koffiepoeder suggests, since the vast majority of content on my site is static, I only have to compress a file once when I build the site, no matter how many people later download it. [The small amount of dynamic content on my site isn't compressed, for the reason you suggest.]

That’s a good point, didn’t know it was cached on top.

Depends on efficiency of compression I guess. If X bytes of data takes N time to transmit, and each slice of N takes Y CPU cycles during transmission, how many Y must your compression algorithm use, and how low must it lower N, in order to be more efficient from a CPU utilisation perspective? assumedly there's an inflection point from CPU use perspective, maybe a point that's impractical to achieve? I'm just vibe-thinking-out-loud.

Or your server can cache the compressed content (since it is a static page anyway).

Not necessarily. For example you can pre-compress your files once, and then it'll be up to the clients to decompress on receipt.

It depends on where the bottleneck is. If it’s in network packet size, it would help serve more clients. At the expense of more CPU needed to decode/encode the data. If you’re serving large files and you have headroom in hardware it’s totally normal.

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