However, the gain in time is relatively better than the gain in payload. This indicates that the relationship between payload, TCP packets and transfer time is non-linear and that the first packets on a connection are relatively more expensive than the rest. The result may depend on how the slow start algorithm is implemented on the particular platform. Some TCP stacks implement slow start using one TCP packet whereas others implement it using two packets. This test does not take into account the time it takes to compress an HTML object on the fly and whether this will take longer than the time gained transferring less bytes.
Decompression is done on the fly by the client.