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Re:CSS Sprites vs. Data URIs: Which is faster on mobile? by jchulce on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @05:14PM (#6292723)
even though base64 increases raw size by about a third, this is mitigated by gzip or deflate encoding by the webserver. The actual transmitted size is only about 5% bigger
Re:CSS Sprites vs. Data URIs: Which is faster on mobile? by ajross on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @05:20PM (#6292764)
I measure less than that:

    dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=64 | base64 | gzip | wc -c
    64+0 records in
    64+0 records out
    65536 bytes (66 kB) copied, 0.0127386 s, 5.1 MB/s
    67302
This particular run comes out to ~2.7% overhead, and in fact it's very repeatable. The half dozen runs I did were within 20 bytes of each other.
Re:CSS Sprites vs. Data URIs: Which is faster on mobile? by Scaevolus on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @06:57PM (#6293207)
The overhead is slightly worse when it's compressed alongside normal HTML content (the Huffman trees aren't so favorable).

    $ wget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
    $ (cat ASCII;dd if=/dev/urandom bs=8000 count=1 | base64) | gzip | wc -c
    50578
    $ (cat ASCII;dd if=/dev/urandom bs=9000 count=1 | base64) | gzip | wc -c
    51621
Around 4% overhead. Either way, it's negligible.
Re:CSS Sprites vs. Data URIs: Which is faster on mobile? by b1tr0t on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @05:38PM (#6292869)
Dead on! The overhead with gzip is very tiny. The size of the payload should also not be a factor in the cached condition.