Each chunk fetched with and without XFEATURE COMPRESS GZIP on two connections at the same moment. 30 chunks on homelab (24 bottom-500, 6 deferred): medians 2.9 s compressed, 3.2 s plain; 59 vs 350 bytes per article. Slow fetches (27-52 s) hit either mode, rarely both. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>