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Re: TO COMPRESS OR NOT TO CMPRS (please reply)



Matt Thomas wrote:
>At 06:30 PM 2/17/97 -0800, Daniel Harkins wrote:
>>>  I know that there are some wg members who support the use of compression, 
>>>  some who don't and some who haven't expressed an interest either way.
>Well,
>>>  the time has come to decide. PLEASE RESPOND BY INDICATING YOUR POSITION.
>>>  Be sure to copy the wg list in your reply. 
>>
>>I support the use of compression but not in IPsec. It should be done up
>>higher, perhaps the transport level. It's better to compress the stream
>>of data before it's divided into packets than to wait and compress each 
>>packet. I'd rather see 50 packets then 100 smaller ones.
>>
>In a perfect world, that would be the case.  But not everything will be
>compressed.  (telnet, IP tunnels, ftp, smtp, nntp, etc).  But if you
>can compress the data, you have less to encrypt and you end up sending
>less bits and using less cpu to encrypt those bits.

In a perfect world, that would be the case. But not everything will compress.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist). And I don't buy the cpu saving argument since I
have to compress the packets first and that's not free.

I understand what compression does, I just think it would be *more* beneficial
to be done somewhere else. There's a certain amount of overhead that has to
be spent per packet (regardless of size). Compression can make a given data
stream either occupy fewer packets, or it can make it occupy the same number
of packets as an uncompressed stream (albeit in smaller packets). I prefer
the former.

  Dan.



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