Though, I am speaking a lot about using WSC above Apache Axis, but today I found an interesting old post about Http compression with Apache Axis. This is interesting because, it can boost performance for those who are integrating with Salesforce web services using Java Apache Axis. Here are some benchmarks copied Salesforce WIKI :

“Your request to the server is gzipped compressed (the MC_GZIP_REQUEST property), and the request advertises (via the Accept-Encoding http header) that it'll accept a gzipped response (the MC_ACCEPPT_GZIP property). In the case of an sforce call like Query which can return very large responses you can see some big decreases in message sizes, a quick test here shows that an uncompressed response of 376426 bytes compresses down to a measly 33617 bytes (approx 9% the original size)”

Read More: https://abhinav.fyi/http-compression-with-apache-axis-for-salesforce-web-services/