ergophobe - 12:38 am on Oct 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

>> shorter bits?

No, longer bits ;-)

Or rather, longer chunks. The more repetition, the more compression. Try creating a two text files of all ASCII (so all capable of being represented with seven bits), but one is random and one is just one letter repeated. Huge difference obviously. But now take the large random file and convert it all to lower case. You have a much great chance of a repeated characters, so better compression.

>> i sure wouldn't try to shoehorn this into an existing site

That's what I've heard from early testers. If you're running Wordpress, you'll get better results with WP Super Cache. With mod_pagespeed I've heard there can be some issues with inline Javascript and things like that.

It's better than nothing, but it's not as good as a solution that's customized for the site itself (I suppose that's obvious). So I've heard, if you can't do something else, do mod_pagespeed, then monitor your site very closely, because there are incompatibilities.