For compression, it depends on your data mix. If much of it is mail and web stuff, then the compression hit is well offset by the number/size of packets to encrypt.
Blowfish efficiency is not good for large key sizes. And it is still a 64 bit cipher (why schinier and whiting invented twofish). AES is the way to go, with the HMAC-SHA1-96 MAC; no justification for the SHA2 MAC at this point.