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Minify vs Compression?

Posted Mar 15, 2013 16:25 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355)
In reply to: Minify vs Compression? by rfunk
Parent article: SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

I admit my sampling was rather unscientific being looking at Google and LWN headers, surprisingly the BBC front page isn't compressed at all (perhaps because some random old browser would barf).

However if sites are not enabling gzip they would get a bigger win by enabling gzip than by minifying their JavaScript although obviously if they do both they get the best bang-per-bandwidth bit.

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Posted Mar 15, 2013 19:12 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

enabling gzip with dynamic content adds a significant CPU load to the webservers. For a small site this may not matter, but for a large site, it's frequently cheaper to get the extra bandwith and send out the minified version uncompressed than to pay for the extra machines needed to enable gzip.

Minify vs Compression?

Posted Mar 18, 2013 16:05 UTC (Mon) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]

But as this is regarding minification, we're talking about non-dynamic content anyway, right? So a site could (and many do) gzip their content just once.

Some frameworks offer on demand minification too (MediaWiki's ResourceLoader is the one I know), so technically minification can also be done for dynamic content, but as you say, it depends on where the bottlenecks are as to whether that's a wise move.

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