YUICompressor rewritten from Java - Perl for 50% speed gain

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4 points·Mithaldu··5 comments

So you rewrote unoptimized Java from scratch to get a 50% speed improvement? You probably could have gotten that by modifying a few dozen lines of the original, which appears to be written for clarity, not speed.

Note how startup time is a big factor. Also, strong claim, can you support it and write a faster version of YUICompressor? (Also please make sure it handles all these test cases correctly: https://metacpan.org/source/JANUS/CSS-Compressor-0.02/t/yui )

Any reason it can't be kept resident so you don't have to start it up all the time? Should be a fairly simple change to add a batch mode or similar...

Alternatively, best practices appear to be to use caching of the css files:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/#using

"If you wish to minify your files on the backend (also known as on-the-fly minification) instead of at build time, you will want to cache the minified files in memory for optimal performance (instead of minifying the same files over and over & minification is a time consuming process) Note that the YUI Compressor can easily be instantiated and used from a Java-based environment (Servlet). "

The line is just "50% faster"?

The speed improvement is a bonus because the real benefit is it being an easy to install & use app/module (the only dependency is Perl).

If I was after bigger speed bump then I would consider using CSS::Minifier::XS which is a Perl + C app/module - https://metacpan.org/module/CSS::Minifier::XS

NB. CSS::Minifier::XS is reputedly 152% faster than CSS::Compressor - http://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/14udtf/efficient_css_c...

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