[dwattttt]

Multiplying them is another way of expressing them as a unified value. It's not a question of accidental bias, you're explicitly choosing how important one second is compared to one byte.

You could imagine there's a 1 sec/byte multiplier on the bytes value, saying in effect "for every byte of gzipped source, penalise the benchmark by one second".

[sidkshatriya]

> You could imagine there's a 1 sec/byte multiplier on the bytes value, saying in effect "for every byte of gzipped source, penalise the benchmark by one second".

Your explanation makes sense. However the main issue is we don’t know if this “penalty” is fair or correct or has some justifiable basis. In absence of any explanation it would make more sense to multiply them together as a “sane default”. Later, having done some research we can attach some weightage perhaps appealing to some physical laws or information theory. Even then I doubt that + would be the operator I would use to combine them.