What exactly does it do, what are the plusses and minuses?

I take it that it saves bandwidth.

What is the drawback, if any? Takes up more of the CPU? More memory?

I would always enable it

Pro: Saves BW
Con: Utilizes more CPU/memory

Some wills ay that it's not really noticable, and if you're coming from UBB.C it'll definately not be noticeable lol

works well use it ..

but be carefull if you use PhotoPost too. There you hate to leave it of because doubled enbled zlib (in threads and pp) will cause outputput junk from doubled on-the-fly compresion.

Disable it in PhotoPost and use it in UBB ;)...

I am having no issues running both.

Thanks for the replies guys. I have a lot of available bandwidth but sadly not enough memory and the CPU is being overworked as well.

So in my case I will have to switch it off...

P.S. anyone know what the birthday cache is all about?

I'm on a heavily overloaded server with a fairly nice sized site; I don't see any real impact from having it on (keep in mind my site is generally the poster child of what not to do with your community lol)

I have mine turned off on PP - but on on threads.

I'm betting if you have a server that's newer than something created out of scrap TRS-80 parts you'll find that enabling zlib compression will not be noticeable in terms of CPU or memory.

The gains are more than lower bandwidth.

Think about it, we shrink each page by a considerable amount then send that down the pipe to the user's browser. Less data size to move, right? So, if you turn on zlib it'll make the pages feel faster to the end user, and that's a good thing

End of the day the best answer is to advise you to turn it on and try it. If your CPU can't stand it, or you find yourself getting memory errors then turn it off, otherwise leave it on and do your bandwidth and your users a favor

Think of the 28.8 users (and other modem users) who visit your site, they'll love it

28.8??? Mine are all still on 9.6!!

/me throws a 9600 baud modem at Ian

I have a 'Dataphone' 300/1200 Baud

to think we were quite contented in those days

Psh, I'm still not content and I'm on a 8mb/500k cable line...

Na lets not think about 28.8 users They shouldn't be on the interweb

Its actually quite common to have modem-based-users in todays world... In fact, I'd be willing to take a stab in the dark and guess that about 30% of my users are on dialup

puke

Agreed, but catering to "less fortunate" users is still a reality

I guess I am on dial-up speeds from my laptop/pda