>Haha, you cracked me up :) > >I'm not sure of the figures for processing the packed version, however >this would need to be done for every page of your site that the user >visits because the JS is cached in packed form. This means that >whatever the overhead is for unpacking the packed version, the delay >is applied to every page of your site. For this reason, even if the >regular minified (non-packed) version was even a bit larger than it >is, I'd definitely lean towards using it as this can be cached once >and used without delay on all subsequent pages.
Yahoo released a paper about the time they release YSlow--which indicated that, much to everyone's surprise, browsers are not caching content as much as we might think they are. http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part-2/ "40-60% of Yahoo!'s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there's no other research that shows this kind of information. And I don't know about you, but these results came to us as a big surprise. It says that even if your assets are optimized for maximum caching, there are a significant number of users that will always have an empty cache. This goes back to the earlier point that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time. The percentage of users with an empty cache for different web pages may vary, especially for pages with a high number of active (daily) users. However, we found in our study that regardless of usage patterns, the percentage of page views with an empty cache is always ~20%." I found this really informative and a little surprising (especially since I think most people who use Yahoo use it on a fairly frequent basis.) -Dan
