Tom Sieron' wrote: > On 9/12/07, Justin Sepulveda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Curious, would the speed increases come from using the minified >> version verses the packer version? >> >> > > I've recently stumbled upon such an opinion : > http://www.julienlecomte.net/blog/2007/08/21/gzip-your-minified-javascript-files/ > > Could someone in the know please comment on the possible overhead for > unpacking and eval'ing mentioned in this article? > > Better to minify or to pack (regarding execution time, not the > download time and/or bandwidth load)? > > There is definitely overhead involved in the startup of packed scripts. That's the price you pay for the smaller file size. Depending on the connection speed it may be faster to use the compressed version.
When you minify you get a smaller file size than the original but not as small as the packed version. You don't incur any execution overhead and probably get a small performance boost because there is less for the JavaScript interpreter to parse. If your server (and the browser) supports compression you can get even better performance because the decompression is performed by the browser, not the JavaScript interpreter. After the packed version's initial hit at startup, packed and minified versions should perform the same. Aaron