pulsar

I understand that I haven't provided the underlying infrastructure characteristics here, please let me know if that is needed.

i think you should look at it from cost perspective. compression reduces size by at least half. is that reduction in cost (offset some additional cpu cycles).. big enough for you? depending on your payload content, you may not reap compression benefits until you start batching data, batching then will add to your produce latencies..

its storage and network bandwidth savings vs slightly increased cpu and increased produce latencies

you also <https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/3.1.x/concepts-messaging/#batching|loose message level redelivery> if you enable batching, but that can be enabled at cost of additional cpu usage in broker (although i am not sure what's the impact is)