Most CDN's are CPU bound, not network bound, compression is a huge hit. It also destroys zero-copy-socket performance, by eliminating it. Assuming that Akamai i

Most CDN's are CPU bound, not network bound, compression is a huge hit. It also destroys zero-copy-socket performance, by eliminating it. Assuming that Akamai is charging based on pre-compression bits when they do gzip, would be unwise. Gzip is also pointless for video or pre-compressed data, which is a big chunk of what people do over CDNs anyways.