php and gzip compression
 

I was fooling around trying to code an uber leet photo gallery thing and i read about php's gzip functions. I played around with em and got nothing to work. I'm trying to take a string of an image read in using the GD lib, compress it, save to a file. opening it is pretty easy. Any one have any experience using these functions? Any points i need to look out for?

I have it turned on for the forums.

I have it set at level 1 (default)

You can set it from level 1 -> level 9

But -- the compression level at level 9 makes the data sent smaller, however any time you save in sending the data is spent in the actual compression process. So you really are losing data sending time, and gaining it back in processing time and just adding a load to your processor.

Thats what I read on the vBulletin forums about mod_gzip, at least.

well, im doing this on the server side to conserve space. i'd send the uncompressed picture from the compressed archive on the server. i really don't care too much about bandwidth yet