Hi all,
I am wondering about the impact of gzipping CSS and JS files (after aggregation) in comparison to CPU cycles. In our Drupal site I have installed and enabled the JS and CSS aggregation modules, but they weren't utilized. So after some investigation I asked our hosts tech support and they confirmed that we're not serving resources compressed. From what I understood it was not enabled on the server side.
I was told that utilizing compression (gzip) would not provide me significant amount of savings, but impact the CPU cycles substantially.
Especially if you are running a CMS, such as Drupal, and you expect to find yourself running into a situation where you have any substantial amount of traffic, I would recommend against gzipping your data. Using compression across HTTP was far more common when users' bandwidth was the limiting factor rather than the computational ability of the server.
How accurate is this comparison? I have been trying to optimize our site to load faster, but am wondering through what great length I should go seeing that blogs like techcrunch, lifehacker, and style perform much worse than our site in Googles PageSpeed and YSlow. So far our biggest drawback is Facebook and twitter, that serve their content separate and without compression.
What do you do on your own sites and how much should one delve into trying to tweak a site?
Thank you very much - your feedback is greatly appreciated.