In addition to increasing bandwidth, moving away from packages increased latency due to sub-optimal behavior of our webserver when serving hundreds of JavaScript source files. Our analysis of this behavior was not entirely satisfactory, since we do not control our webserver (we use Google App Engine).
Cine s-ar fi așteptat?
The reality is not so rosy. Due to degraded compression performance, the size of the data download with individual source files ends up being higher than with packages, despite having achieved ‘no wasted bytes’. Likewise, the promised download efficiency has yet to show up in the wild, at least for us. It seems that, for the moment at least, JavaScript packaging is here to stay.