What's the optimal GZIP compression setting for IIS?

Question

You can set the HcDynamicCompressionLevel anywhere from 0-10. I've heard 10 is bad (high CPU usage), but what's the magic number that works the best?

Answer 1

It seems to me that this would really depend on your situation. If you're serving a lot of large files and have some CPU power to spare, then a higher number would be better. However, as you have more concurrent connections, smaller files, and a less powerful CPU, a smaller number is better.

Answer 2

10 was bad when CPUs were two orders of magnitude slower than they are now. The gzip algorithm is pretty fast as far as compression algorithms go these days, so I'd set it to 10 and see what happens.

Answer 3

I've found that setting it to 8 gives a pretty good rate of compression without hammering the server too much. It will depend on your server load and specification.