# from jiho # on Sunday 22 January 2006 06:50 am:
Does embedding have any performance penalties?
I thought I read here that embedding images directly in SVG is very bad for performance. but maybe you were thinking of a new file format then.
The byte size increase is typically a 4:3 ratio, so there is the added reading (less the overhead of opening another file and reading that) plus the decoding. In most cases, this is going to be fast enough that it doesn't make a lot of difference (and if it saves head-scratching, then it is a net win.)
As for overall size and gzipped size, here is an example:
$ cat tiger.png | perl -e '$/=undef; use MIME::Base64; print encode_base64(<>);' > /tmp/tiger.b64
$ gzip -c < /tmp/tiger.b64 >/tmp/tiger.b64.gz
$ du -b tiger.png /tmp/tiger.b64* 405334 tiger.png 547560 /tmp/tiger.b64 412008 /tmp/tiger.b64.gz
--Eric