PageSpeed bug for Gzip compression - even for smaller file

[Nurul Amin]

PageSpeed Insights or thinkwithgoogle checked whether Gzip compression is enabled or not.

Now we can do this compression in the web server layer (for example, Apache) or in the Load Balancer layer (for example, F5)

In the web server layer, it is done by the software, however, in the LoadBalancer level it is done by the hardware. So, in terms of the optimization, recommendation from our operation team is to use Load Balancer for such CPU oriented task (i.e compression).

Issue is, if your file size is less than 1024 bytes, it is not recommended to compress them because compressing smaller file creates overhead and might make the file bigger.

Unfortunately, if we do not compress all the files (JS, CSS, HTML...) including the smaller one, Google PageSpeed or other utilities gave us very bad ranting by saying (GZIP is not enabled :()

So, we made two study.

- We zipped in Apache instead of F5 and decided to Zip all the files (even smaller one), now, we got very good rating in PageSpeed but we are stressing our Apache server.

- We zipped in F5, but our operation team deny to zip smaller file, so now we have no more stress on the server, but we have bad rating on PageSpeed.

So, for us this is a bug in PageSpeed. PageSpeed should only consider GZipping if file size is bigger than 1024 bytes.

What do you think?

[Joshua Marantz]

Another option is to use mod_pagespeed, which will minify & compress your static assets with gzip -9, caching the compressed results.  If you turn off all the mod_pagespeed options other than this, it should not put much burden on your server, and everything will be served compressed without the per-request CPU impact.

Having said that, I'm curious if you have measured the impact of just letting mod_deflate run in terms of CPU overhead.  the default gzip setting is not very CPU intensive for modern CPUs.

-Josh

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