The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can actively regulate associated gateways in connection with lossless application-level compression. In particular, the architecture can monitor a flow of messages that enter and/or traverse a gateway in order to determine a bandwidth utilization of an associated network due to the messages. The architecture can also monitor the aggregate messages load for the associated network due to all gateways. In particular, the architecture can regulate lossless application-level compression at that gateway or all of the gateways in the set as a function of the bandwidth utilization and/or the aggregate message load. Accordingly, compression features can be activated or deactivated based upon a utilization threshold parameter, and gateways can be regulated uniformly or independently from one another.