I set up a server to use the Apache2 deflate recently.
Some people started reporting long waiting times on certain pages. The page in particular is one that takes a long time to load, as it's gathering data from external sources. Usually it loads progressively, which is good for user feedback. The whole page can take 10-15 seconds to finish. I turned deflate off and the page seems more responsive.
Does deflate encode a partial response... or does it make it wait for the entire page to load first? Is there different behavior in clients in dealing with gzip/deflate/whatever that I should be aware of?