when to minify

I spite of what I thought here, it has been pointed out to me that jQuery does lose more than half of its file size when minified. It is so big that it has that much copy in private variable names and line returns or other whitespace. Unbelievable! Alright, if you're using a giant 3rd party library or rolling your own, then, yes, you should minify. Another way to really help is to bundle many minified files into one for one trip over the wire in delivery. There is a way in ASP.NET MVC apps to keep not minified files at the server and to minify and send upon client request. This allows for debugging against the easy-to-read stuff and the performance gain of minification to really come in the trip over the wire on the fly.