[wp-hackers] Packing JavaScript

[Kevin Newman]

Jeremy Visser wrote:
> Omry Yadan wrote:
>   
>> 2. obviously reducing the size of the code will make it download faster,
>> but does it really matter with today's conditions of fast connections
>> and smart browsers that cache everything?
>>     
>
> Only if you live in the USA. Consider us poor souls living in Australia.
> I gather the 'norm' for broadband speeds in the US is around 8mbit, right?
>
> Well, over in Oz, (where we have to travel by riding flying foxes
> everywhere, because otherwise we'd fall into the sky, as everything's
> upside-down here), the average broadband speed is 512K. If you live in a
> CBD, you can get 24mbit, but that's not affordable for most people.
>
> Plus, often latency is the issue, not bandwidth. Believe it or not, it
> takes me 250 milliseconds to ping most websites. I'm sure that someone
> in the US would have < 50msec. So, in the 200msec they're ahead of me,
> I'm sure they could have executed most of the JS unpacker while mine is
> still waiting for a response.
>
>   
These are good points. In the US, if you use the cheap DSL packages
(Verizon offers one for 14.95 or something), latency and the number of
simultaneous connections can be a problem. I could be wrong, but I think
they are limitted to 4 total simultaneous connections - bittorrents are
dog slow on those packages, and loading multiple sites is a real killer.
Surfing the net while downloading anything large can even be unbearable
(granted, those problems could have been specific to my experience with
it, but I do remember reading about those connection limits somewhere).

Anything that reduces round trips to the server can be a god send for a
connection like that.

Kevin N.