Your findings, Lee, is about what I’d expect. This, of course, if the deploy is done (well maybe not now) from a unicast stand point rather than a Multicast.
Compression is a fickle thing. Uploading anything and compressing before doing so always take far more time than re-obtaining the data even if the re-obtaining is highly compressed. This is because the CPU is actually doing much more work finding what can and how much it can be compressed.
On a download, the less data you have to transfer, the faster it transfers.