Faster internet with compression?

[Poet129]

I have a vps with a 0.48 gigabit connection to the Internet, My home connection is about 30 megabit or ~0.03 gigabit. If I set up some kind of compression VPN how much speed would I stand to gain? Also any recommendations? The VPS runs Ubuntu 20.04 Server.

[Eigenvektor]

Most web servers/browsers already use GZIP or similar compression for the content they deliver. For example I can see "content-encoding: br" in the header returned by LTT (=Brotli compression algorithm).

 

You can't compress content that is already compressed (unless the compression is suboptimal). Meaning you'll mostly increase CPU usage for little to no gain. In fact trying to compress compressed content could end up increasing its size.

 

For file transfers I'd expect most content is also compressed already (e.g. zip files).

 

~edit:

https://hamy.io/post/0003/optimizing-openvpn-throughput/#gsc.tab=0

Quote

In today’s world where most connections are either encrypted or pre-compressed (and more commonly both), you probably should think twice before setting up compression on top of your vpn tunnel.

…

Security complications could arise when encryption and compression are used together.