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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, this doesn't show a performance improvement, it shows a file size reduction. Of course you can assume one leads to the other, but it doesn't fully prove the point.

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    time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.js > /dev/null
    real	0m0.433s

    time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js > /dev/null
    real	0m0.210s

Is it proved now ?

Edit: Off course I didn't ran these requests only once.

The obvious next question is "can't you achieve the same thing with gzip":

    time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.js > /dev/null
    236k bytes
    real	0m0.432s

    time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js > /dev/null
    83612 bytes
    real	0m0.323s

    time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.js --compressed > /dev/null
    87509 bytes
    real	0m0.273s

    time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js --compressed > /dev/null
    34066 bytes
    real	0m0.215s

I think that people should be more skeptical of the complexity introduced by things like minification, but the advantages are pretty clear, even with compression.

This still doesn't show that actual site performance is improved. Also, gzip is not enabled on that server, so I think it's a less realistic scenario. I'm certainly being pedantic, but I've run into similar surprises before.

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