Just to offer some minor clarifications. The reason I don't think compression will make a big difference on typical page load times is that I expect at PerlMonks that most slow page loads are due to slow server response, not due to large amounts to be downloaded. But, yes, for people on slow links, compression could make a big difference even when PerlMonks is being slow to respond.

I also don't expect compression to be a source of large amounts of CPU consumption. It was just that, at a time when the web servers were often just running out of CPU, taking CPU to compress the pages was as likely to make the server response enough slower that the net result was not an improvement. Even more important, when a web server got overloaded (ran out of CPU), adding to the CPU load for every page delivered would likely mean the overload condition would linger for longer (being slow leads to a build-up of requests which makes things slow...).

Adding compression should be just a "win" at this point.