When caching item in App Engine's memcache I used gzip compression to save space and get below the 1MB limit for some files.
Since I also put rendered pages into the memcache, I though it would be nice and much quicker to directly return the gzipped body to the client, if it accepts gzip encdoing.
Unfortunately the request's Accept-Encoding only has the value identity (using the AE dev server with Go), which to me means I have to return the body as-is (i.e. plain html).
Is one not supposed to gzip contents themselves? Or could I always return gzipped content with the appropriate headers, and the AE infrastructure would decompress this when the client does not support compression?
After all I hope to get even better response times by caching the response in its output state.
For caching the response, if your response is public (same copy for all users), you can make use of Google's edge cache by setting the proper HTTP headers, for example:
Cache-Control: public,max-age=86400
Expires: Sat, 16 May 2015 07:23:15 +0000
About compression, as far as I know, Google automatically compress the content in HTTP response whenever possible. There is no need to handle this manually.