This page asynchronously times test loads of various sizes of file. It is considered good practice for a webserver to employ compression (for example, 'deflate' or 'gzip'), but both compression at the server and decompression in the browser have a fairly high overhead, and thus experience tends to suggest that small files may be sent faster uncompressed. By comparing times from a webserver source that compresses the data it sends with one that does not, one can estimate the maximum size of file that is likely to be sent faster uncompressed. Although results tend to be highly variable, depending on bandwidth, contention, etc, experience with this page suggests that the crossover point is usually between 16-64KB - anything smaller than this could probably be sent uncompressed, anything larger definitely should be compressed.
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