Does Nginx compress files for every request? (with gzip_on)
Solution 1:
Yes Nginx will compress index.html each time it is requested since there is no index.html.gz file.
To be honest gzip is not very processor intensive these days and gzipping on the fly (and then unzipping in the browser) is often the norm. It’s something web browsers are very good at.
So unless you are getting huge volumes of traffic you’ll probably not notice any performance or CPU load impact due to on the fly gzipping for most web files.