I think the key word here is "small". I've experimented a bit and have
found that small files compress much differently than large files. I
conjecture that this is because there is some overhead in storing a table
with the original strings (e.g. - "Separator {") mapped to their
compressed counterparts. A table of 2 character values is much shorter
than a table of 10 character values. This is significant for small test
files, much less so for real world files.
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- excerpt from "A Horror Movie Character's Survival Guide"