RE: compressing a website

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Very rarely will you want to compress to a level of 9 as the extra work the server has to perform reduces any benefit.

Typically a setting of 1 or 2 is more than adequate.

[url=http://leknor.com/code/gziped.php]GZip test[/url] your site to find the optimum setting.

Remember that the more compression that is put into effect the more work the server has to do for [b]every[/b] request.  When you have a lot of users requesting a lot of pages, your site will be slower than a snail if the server is trying to compress every page that much.

As with everything, there is a point of diminishing returns and 3 is usually the limit with GZip.