Compressing js files

[flapane]

Just wondering if compressing (before releasing the next public version of CPG, so that the average user will already have optimized js files) the biggest javascript files would worth anything.
I managed to save about 60% by compressing the biggest 9 files (jquery among other) in /js folder, that means a little bit more than 100kB.
Would Google spiders or an user with a slower connection be positively affected?

[Αndré]

Try that plugin.

[flapane]

That's not what I was exactly talking about.
As you can see, the plugin is in an early development stage and I don't want to try it at the moment, while I already manually compressed the js files, and was trying to understand (suggest) if it was a good thing to do it in the development stage (read: you and the other developers) just after the coding has finished, so that every user who will visit a coppermine gallery, will save some bandwith.

[Αndré]

I don't know the different compression methods, so I cannot decide that. Methods that makes the js file unreadable are out of the question, at least for the development branch. But as Coppermine is a picture gallery, the size of the js files shouldn't be that bad.

[Stramm]

If you need compression badly best is to do that with an apache module, e.g. mod_deflate http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html
Or google for mod_gzip