Recently, the importance of variable displacement piston pump is increasing in industrial world. Especially, most consumers require various range of pressures and flow rates. Pressure compensator is a system controlling flow rate in piston pump at low cost and, therefore, satisfies the need of consumers. However, the system has serious problems, such as response and leakage. The response and leakage are affected by clearance between actuator piston and cylinder, roughness of surface, and spool overlap. In this paper, these effects are investigated experimentally, and optimal clearance and chamfer is obtained. While diameter of cylinder is fixed and diameter of actuator piston is changed in this experiment, response and leakage are measured. Also parameters such as roughness and processing accuracy are changed for piston of fixed clearance. Experimental setup modelled into several parts of actuator piston, cylinder, spool, and swash plate. Input pressure is changed by function generator and proportional valve. The result of this experiment shows that leakage increases very much in proportion to the increase of clearance, and especially leakage occurs enormously when clearance is more than 0.002. The response is not good because as clearance increases leakage increases and as clearance decreases viscous damping effect increases. Accordingly, it is found out that optimal clearance range exists for tile response, within about 0.0012∼0.0014, at this time. Futhermore, the better roughness and geometrical accuracy of actuator piston are, the smaller are leakage and friction. The paper informs that response and leakage are influenced by and geometrical accuracy of actuator piston, roughness of surface, and the clearance between actuator piston and cylinder, and that optimal design of actuator piston in the pressure compensator is possible.