I keep hearing that gzip your site is a good practice to speed-up delivery. My site has a very vast load in general, shall i still look into gzip? I also read about disadvantages of using gzip, such as time required to unzip contents for the browser to display. Is it true?
UPDATE:
This question is based on the assumption that the site is fairly optimized already.
Actually I optimized it already. Most of the content on my site is db driven and originally it took some time to load it all, so what I did, I wrote a few scripts that run nightly, generate content and store it as static HTML files that are included on the heaviest trafficked pages. The load on the server is way below its capacity, so, thank you for that insight, I will consider it more seriously now. I was thinking of using some PHP class that does it dynamically. Do you have any recommendations?
Compressing your response will help with transfer times. That means it will decrease the time it will take for the user to download the generated page. It will not (in general) reduce the load on your server. In fact, it can increase it slightly since compression itself is not free (it eats up some CPU cycles).
Typically, there’s no disadvantage from a user experience (only advantages).
However, if your server is already heavily loaded, I’d probably skip it since it will only add to that load (in general). Optimize the code first, then add compression. Don’t try to add compression as a band-aid for poorly optimized code (it won’t work)…