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Comment by pieter | Hacker News Reader

I doubt domain length will really make any difference, gzip compression should take care of a longer domain name.

The 50 bytes figure represents a compressed response. (We actually write all of our pages compressed to disk before serving them -- nothing is served dynamically. But that's for another post...)

The example below isn't the most scientific, but should give you a rough idea.

  Test index page with different static URLs:
  URLs as 4cdn.org -- 23261 bytes compressed
  URLs as 4chan-cdn.org -- 23311 bytes compressed
  URLs as 4chan.org (control) -- 23278 bytes compressed

So 4ch.io would have knocked-off another 30 bytes or so?

BRB, switching everything now!

Can someone with more ZIP-algorithm knowledge than me explain why a difference in word length of 5 characters can result in a difference of compressed result length of 50 characters? I mean, a reference to a 1000-character word takes as much space as a reference to a 1-character word?

He did say "~50 bytes compressed".

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