[dogma1138]

Because you want to test it with it on and off and understand the impact it has. Text (Javascript, HTML) compresses rather well (on average 3 to 1 or better) it's considerably more likely that you are going to hit a networking limit than than a CPU limit when not using GZIP or any other compression method. So when you do stress or load testing you really want to issue the same requests with and without the Accept-Encoding: compress, gzip or any similar headers.

Also in some cases you want to disable accepting GZIP on the server side completely because if you accept GZIP encoded requests an attacker can send very large requests that compress very well forcing you to decompress them eating up a lot of memory and CPU cycles on your side only to discard them. In principle you want to accept only non-compressed requests but send compressed responses to save bandwidth, but in any case you want to know how your service/application scaling works in with all cases and combinations.