

I am wondering why not all websites enabling this great feature GZIP? - lmacvittie
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/05/27/i-am-wondering-why-not-all-websites-enabling-this-great.aspx

======
jws
First: The non-linear increase in CPU consumption versus file size is not
adequately explained in the benchmarks. I would do my own benchmarks to see if
that is really true.

Second…

In the dark old days, there were versions of IE that claimed they could accept
various compressed encodings but could not. This forced people on the server
side to craft all sorts of strange rules based on the user agent which then
broke on various cacheing proxy servers.

If you have tens of thousands of customers you will have some poor sod behind
some misbegotten proxy that will fail and call your support line and burn up
your man hours. Bandwidth is cheap compared to humans and lost customers.

Personally, I compress nearly everything these days and if someone can't use
my sites I don't really care. I have the luxury of telling them to not use
broken software. As for CPU use, I tend to cache the compressed results of
requests so I don't have to gzip on each request, just on each new one.

