[@_ck_ Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

It’s fairly easy to test loading/decoding times using firefox+fasterfox or firebug but there are plenty of studies around the web if you want nitty-gritty details:

a quick search:

http://batiste.dosimple.ch/blog/2007-07-02-1/

http://ejohn.org/blog/library-loading-speed/

http://jst.pbwiki.com/summary.php

http://www.julienlecomte.net/blog/2007/08/13/

jquery with simple whitespace removal and variable name shrinking, *not* actual compression, sent via a server with proper gzip support (mod_gzip, apache2, litespeed, etc) is always fastest. Packed is always the worst. Not only that, packed has to be unpacked for EVERY page load. It’s never ready to run. So it uses more browser memory, and has a delay *every* time.

By the way, what does jquery actually do within bbpress’s topics for regular users? I don’t get it, there’s no javascript actions. bbpress used to have ajax posting but that was removed a long time ago (it should come back sometime…)

If you absolutely must distribute bbpress (and wordpress) with jquery in a more compressed form, please use the jsmin version but definitely not the packed version.