"How much CPU time do you expect to use to gzip a 70KB page ?"

Wouldn't that depend on various factors?

My point was that your suggested ten minute change could end up doing more harm than good, as others have also suggested.

The metric in your example does not take into consideration any of the factors including the servers CPU speed, the servers memory, the applications (Perlmonks custom version of everything and the DB queries) or the load. As you say "I don't have the statistics of your site, nor the server specifications".

Your suggestion that compressing data on your laptop (with a relatively modern CPU) is a comparable benchmark for running compression on old servers isn't, IMHO, a sensible approach to benchmarking the impact nor justification for someone taking ten minutes out of their day to implement your untested change, which may take longer to recover from should the resulting performance be unfavourable.

Failure to consider your environment can lead to trouble.