Roll your own~

Roll your own~

I have an idea for a website, but it hinges on the ability of this to work, and to be effective on the server time available.

I am looking t create a repository of certain, small but numerous items (100k - 5mb at norm) and other than straight out downloads allowing a user to 'roll their own' pack of items and download them as a pack (.zip or .rar compression). I can see this working for a small group of items, but is it effective to have the server compressing and making these packs available for download?

I am going to, if it is effective use jquery for the list (cart) management but Im not sure how the compressing will go.

Will this work / should I bother?