"Files that are sent to the client are compressed with gzip, unless they are under 4096 bytes." That's interesting. Is that a common optimization? I hadn't heard of any other web server doing that.
As everything will end up in a packet when sent through the network stack, you might want to choose your minimum input size in such way, that you generate gzip-compressed output big enough. Why big enought? Nagle's algorithm [1]
So yet another reason to think about 'what to gzip'.