Does GZIP Compression Level Have Any Impact On Decompression

Question

I understand that GZIP is a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding and can be configured with a level between 1-9 where 1 indicates the fastest compression (less compression

Answer 1

Actually, in real world measurements a higher compression level yields lower decompression times (which might be primarily caused by the fact that you need to handle less permanent storage and less RAM access).

Since, actually, most things that happen at a client with the data are rather expensive compared to gunzipping, you shouldn't really care about that, at all.

Also be advised that for static assets that are images, usually huffman/zlib coding (PNG simply uses zlib!) is already applied, and you won't gain much by gzipping these. Actually, often small images (for example, icons) fit into a single TCP packet (ignoring the HTTP header, which sometimes is bigger than the image itself) and therefore you don't get any speed gain (but save money on transfer volume -- if you deliver terabytes of small images. Now, may I presume you're not Google itself...

Also, I'd like to point you to higher level optimization, like tools that can transform your javascript code into a compacter shape (eg. removing whitespace, renaming private variables from my_mother_really_likes_this_number_of_unicorns to m1); also, things like JQuery come in a "precompressed" form. The same exists for HTML. Doesn't make things easier to debug, but since you seem to be interested in ultimate space saving...