In general, compression works much better the more data it has to work with. When you're talking about one or two KiB files, the overheads are going to eat into

In general, compression works much better the more data it has to work with. When you're talking about one or two KiB files, the overheads are going to eat into a lot of your gains. It's definitely still worthwhile, but I can see how a custom packed binary format could easily outperform a compressed text format at these sizes.