: What is recommended minimum object size for gzip performance benefits? I'm working on improving page speed display times, and one of the methods is to gzip content from the webserver. Google

@Yeniel560

Posted in: #Compression #Gzip #HttpHeaders #PageSpeed #Performance

I'm working on improving page speed display times, and one of the methods is to gzip content from the webserver.

Google recommends:


Note that gzipping is only beneficial for larger resources. Due to the overhead and latency of compression and decompression, you should only gzip files above a certain size threshold; we recommend a minimum range between 150 and 1000 bytes. Gzipping files below 150 bytes can actually make them larger.


We serve our content through Akamai, using their network for a proxy and CDN. What they've told me:


Following up on your question regarding what is the minimum size Akamai will compress the requested object when sending it to the end user: The minimum size is 860 bytes.


My reply:


What is the reason(s) for why Akamai's minimum size is 860 bytes? And why, for example, is this not the case for files Akamai serves for Facebook? (see below) Google recommends to gzip more aggressively. And that seems appropriate on our site where the most frequent hits, by far, are AJAX calls that are <860 bytes.


Akamai's response:


The reasons 860 bytes is the minimum size for compression is twofold: (1) The overhead of compressing an object under 860 bytes outweighs performance gain. (2) Objects under 860 bytes can be transmitted via a single packet anyway, so there isn't a compelling reason to compress them.


So I'm here for some fact checking. Is the 860 byte limit due to packet size the end of this reasoning? Why would high traffic sites push this down to the 150 byte limit... just to save on bandwidth costs (since CDNs base their charges on bandwidth offloaded from origin), or is there a performance gain in doing so?



7/9/12 Update:
I asked Steve Souders if there a performance gain in gzipping responses that
are already smaller than a packet and what is
the recommended minimum object size for gzip performance
benefits, and this is his response:


Thanks for your email. The size is somewhere between 1-5K. Apache has
a default but I forget what it is - that would be a good guide.


We do our compression on an F5 appliance, so we are going to lower it to ~350 bytes, since there are a decent amount of AJAX calls between that and 1K. The AJAX calls that are less than 350 bytes on our website are all down around 70 bytes... less than Google's recommendations... so it really seems to fall back to: know your website and adjust based on your code.

I'll get back to this post after the F5 update runs in Production for a while. I think there will be little performance benefit, but we'll lower our Akamai costs a bit since they are serving less.

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