I tested woff2 vs woff memory usage over the Google Fonts corpus (1654
files) by compressing each file to both woff and woff2 then running time -f
%M woff[12]_decompress to get peak memory use in Kbytes.
WOFF2 uses modestly more memory than WOFF, averaging 1.05x. At the median
there was no memory increase. The worst result was 1.7x more memory for
WOFF2 decompression.
In more detail:
[image: Inline image 1]
Input corpusFontsCount1654Font sizeAverage200(Kbytes)Median95Stdev658
DecompressionWOFF2/WOFF1Average1.05Median1.00Stdev0.11Max1.70WOFF2 Peak use
Average8,184(Kbytes)Median7,628Stdev2,059WOFF Peak useAverage7,735(Kbytes)
Median7,592Stdev1,125
Tests were executed on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS. The raw numbers can be viewed in
this sheet
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nZZ9iDRteIDYgJwnA_Kp4cOHu1aaUX2xplhdyV1qVk8/edit#gid=0>
.
This is intended to fulfill action-168
<https://www.w3.org/Fonts/WG/track/actions/168>.
Rod S.
