my intuition is you can save cpu time when compressing before sending over the network (and certainly wall time).
a quick test copying a 24M file (with similiar compression ratios) to s3 showed a 6% decrease in cpu time when piping through gzip.
a quick test copying a 24M file (with similiar compression ratios) to s3 showed a 6% decrease in cpu time when piping through gzip.
I wouldn't normally expect gzip to be a net savings (it's comparatively more expensive), but depending on compression ratio achieved and what layers you're passing the bytes through, I'd definitely believe it can be in some contexts.
Gzip is in the order of 10 MB/s with default settings, down to 1 MB/s with the strongest compression setting. It's really really slow.
slz is closer to level 20 (if there was a level 20). It's fast but the compression ratio is meh. You're better of using lz4 or zstd.