The PNG compresses image data with DEFLATE (the same algorithm used in zlib and PKZIP). If you want to minimise the filesize when saving a PNG file, the sacrifice comes in the time it takes to compress the file. with a smaller file size) should generally take less time to load than the same image with a larger size.
The huge line-art that I referred to was mostly desktop wallpapers like the ones at, but various posters, videogame resources, and other things could also fit that description.īetter-compressed images (i.e. Windows users might not notice this, but most icons used by the desktop environment are stored with PNG compression, and dozens of them need to be rendered when the system starts. I don't know if this information affects the question, but I am wondering about this in relation to both icon-type files (which are small because they contain few pixels) and huge line-art files (which are small because they compress their pixels very effectively).ĮDIT: In response to the answers I've been getting, I want to note that this is not strictly a network issue. We all know that more-compressed PNG images take longer to compress, but do they take longer to decompress? Technically that would be trivial too, but I've wondered about it for a long time. When I create PNG files with very small disk size, I tend to wonder if the file size becomes less important than the time viewers would need to decompress the image.