Google speed tools is recommending I gzip my pages, I was wondering if there is any downside to that? I use a lot of dynamic content that changes daily, will there be issues with caching? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Cheers.
Well, if it's Google who recommends, there should be no downside ) Joke aside, in my own experience there's no known downside. There were some with older browsers misinterpreting headers, while ago, but today gzip is most popular compression algorithm. You should gzip your htmls, stylesheets and scripts. Ah, i have spoken, scripts, yes ... put them in one file if it's possible. Don't gzip your images, pdfs and stuff that are already compressed. Suma sumarum: If you're worried, since you've said your content changes daily try to avoid gzipping your php pages. Hope I helped!
Gzip is supported by all modern browsers, and I think IE4+ in Internet Explorer family... so there is no downside really. You save and your users save bandwidth and time.
downside could be cpu usage on larger websites.. You have to compare benefits in bandwidth against cpu usage, but on smaller websites there´s no downside..=)
Never used it because I got an impression that some browser will display the page incorrectly, and the server will use more resource to gzip the page first before sending it out. I planned to use it on large site but didn't due to those reasons, and for small sites - why bother using it...
I have enabled it on a few of my sites and haven't seen any issues. My research suggested that older browsers would not support it but older browsers also don't support pngs and a lot of todays css so that was fine by me.
No there won't be issues with caching. This is compression over the transfer, not on the client side. And if the site is not extremely huge, it won't be even felt.
The processing speed of the server is the only problem I know against using gzip. If you use shared hosting, it will be slower with gzip as the CPU may get overloaded with compression on may pages. However, if it is a fast server (like i7 or Quad Core with enough memory) or you use dedicated hosting, gZip will be a great option to save bandwidth, deliver pages faster, etc...