TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance

it seems worth noting that the block size of gzip/deflate (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1950) can be up to 32Kb, so i wonder if browsers are smart to enough to start rendering before a complete block has been received?

if not, compression could kill network latency... from the graph it seems maximum compression would require about 21 round trips minimum. i suppose this is why zlib's deflate has a flush argument: http://www.zlib.net/manual.html#Basic