This setting allows the messages being sent to be compressed. Remember, compressing messages means less data is transferred over the network or stored in memory/disk. The trade-off is CPU utilization, which goes up as the messages are compressed and decompressed on the sending (producer) and receiving (consumer) ends respectively. The broker stores the messages from the producer without decompressing them. Additionally, compression also increases the latency to send a message. The different algorithms supported for compression include gzip, lz4, and snappy.