On: Page Weight Matters (2012)

[danneu]

Alternatively, I would think that gzip does a good job of factoring out repeatedly embedded user objects.

[spion → danneu]

Yes I agree that gzip will probably fix this single-handedly. The main cost here is very likely network transfer, so gzip will do great.

[joevandyk → danneu]

Don't forget it takes time to parse large json blobs.

[sanderjd → joevandyk]

And to serialize it from whatever the in-memory representation is.

[kuschku → danneu]

yes, obviously – gzip even does that explicitly, replacing repeated text with references.

But it still takes more power for your server to go through gzip every time. And it will take more RAM on the client to store those objects.