I recall doing a benchmark of the Clang compiler that showed that parsing the source files takes much more time than any other stage of compilation. Decompress

I recall doing a benchmark of the Clang compiler that showed that parsing the source files takes much more time than any other stage of compilation. Decompressing a larger amount of content on the client side, and then parsing it, is going to take more resources. Now, it may be a minuscule amount for one page load, but if you multiply it by hundreds of requests and thousands of users, I can see why smaller file sizes can be still be important.