Reasonable compression block-size

Question

What is a reasonable minimum compression block-size for compression ratio when using LZO-like algorithm? I expect that compressing 32B would be useless but compressing 512B might be good. Am I too far? Please, no "check yourself answers" :)

Answer 1

This paper, Table I, shows blocks sizes of 245 to 8196 give compression of 3.3 to 4.3 for ecommerce web data. So 256 is enough to be useful, but more helps. For the Explorer binaries, the ratios went from 1.5 to 2.1 over that range.