I haven't tested the beasley code yet. On a 100 Mbps LAN with a dual 2.0 Ghz Pentium server as web server (so the server should be capable of handling the compression adequately), I found that GZip nor Deflate on just the view state really helped me. I did find that turning on the HTTP compression on IIS 6.0 for the whole page helped me somewhat for the larger pages. Ofcourse, a lot depends here on what pages you are testing, the speed of your server, the speed of your connection, ... In my particular situation, I found that just viewstate GZIp/Deflate compression didn't help me much. I am interested in trying LZO in the future. "In fact, if one or the other happened it would be obvious when the postback loaded - I would be redirected or the response would end. Neither happens on the postback, yet the initial load of the page takes 3 seconds and the postback of the same page, doing the same thing except getting new and different info to display from the database, takes 7 seconds. " I think you are getting hit here by the time to deflate/unzip if you are using viewstate only compression. Else you'll get hit by sending the viewstate uncomrpessed back to the server :).