There shouldn't be any difference in gzip & deflate for decompression. Gzip is just deflate with a few dozen byte header wrapped around it including a checksum. The checksum is the reason for the slower compression. However when you're precompressing zillions of files you want those checksums as a sanity check in your filesystem. In addition you can utilize commandline tools to get stats on the file. For our site we are precompressing a ton of static data (the entire open directory, 13,000 games, autocomplete for millions of keywords, etc.) and we are ranked 95% faster than all websites by Alexa. Faxo Search. However, we do utilize a home grown proprietary web server. Apache/mod_deflate just didn't cut it. When those files are compressed into the filesystem not only do you take a hit for your file with the minimum filesystem block size but all the unnecessary overhead in managing the file in the filesystem that the webserver could care less about. Your concerns should be total disk footprint and access/decompression time and secondarily speed in being able to get this data precompressed. The footprint is important because even though disk space is cheap you want as much as possible to fit in the cache.