This is only effective in compression. The theory offered by ZLIB is that different strategies could potentially produce significant differences in compression behavior for different data sets. Unfortunately I don't have any good recommendations for how to set it differently. When I tested changing the strategy I got minimally different compression performance. It's best to leave this property alone if you don't have a good feel for it. Or, you may want to produce a test harness that runs through the different strategy options and evaluates them on different file types. If you do that, let me know your results.