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Comment by foxhop | Hacker News Reader

Here's a hint, STOP MINIFYING CODE! gzip over transport is enough.

Not exactly, because you still have to pay any distinct identifier present in your code. Also many minifiers do constant folding and inlining and remove comments, any of which almost surely remove redundant or unused information to compress.

I don’t think they’re saying that minifying provides no additional space savings, but rather that those additional savings are small and not worth the tradeoffs.

Not even that is true in my knowledge. For example a particular benchmark [1] demonstrates that many popular libraries benefit much from minification even after gzip compression, with the saving ranging from 35% to 75%. Sure, a small library would be fine without any minification or even compression, but otherwise minification is clearly beneficial.

[1] https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks

I think you have to look at this in the context of an entire bundle or project, and then you have to weigh it against the download speeds you’re generally expecting for the users of your site or app.

I agree that as a blanket statement “gzip is enough” is not technically correct, but I think it’s largely correct in spirit, in that people tend to reach for minification by default, without really thinking about what they’re gaining.

If minifying saves you 200 KB overall, for example, and you expect your average user to have a 200 Mbps connection, you’re saving a grand total of 8 ms on page load, which is an imperceptible difference on its own. In exchange, you’re getting worse debugging, and worse error reporting.

Minification would be indeed useless under that set of assumptions, but the real world is much more variable and you need a comfortable margin. For example, mobiles rarely have that large bandwidth sustained all the time.

Comprehensively speaking, the minification is only a small step in building a performant website or web application. You have way more things to do, for example choosing a correct image compression format and method would have much more impact in general. But not everyone can be expected to understand them in depth, so we have best practices. Doing the minification therefore qualifies as a good best practice, even though it would be just a single one out of many others.

I wonder if 200 KB is small enough that TCP slow start will be the constraint on a download over a new connection, rather than the bandwidth.

I think probably not, if the assets are coming from the same place, since the connection will be reused in most modern situations. Maybe if you’re loading the JS from a CDN though, and there are no other large resources, or those resources come from a different server.

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