Optimized dispersion compensation schemes help to alleviate performance limitations imposed by nonlinear fiber effects on WDM systems. Commonly, precompensation and postcompensation are compared in view of signal distortions. In this paper, the impact of the dominant effects self-phase modulation (SPM), crossphase modulation (XPM) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) is analyzed for a generalized approach comprising the already mentioned compensation schemes as special cases. Each of the identical link sections consists of a standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) and two dispersion compensating fibers (DCFs), which are placed ahead of and behind the transmission fiber. The fundamental issue is the appropriate choice of the length of the DCFs. In view of SRS, the postcompensation scheme turns out to yield best performance. In contrast, system impairment due to XPM is minimized if the dispersion to be compensated per section is split up on the two DCFs.In view of analog signals transmitted in an all-optical network, spectral characteristics of the distortions are investigated. A typical application is the transmission of video signals making use of subcarrier multiplexing (SCM). The results reveal how to reduce the distortions of a particular video channel.