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Re: TO COMPRESS OR NOT TO CMPRS (please reply)
Does anyone (perhaps PPP people?) have statistics on whether
compression at the packet layer is actually effective? What
percentage of packets on a real network are compressible? What
compression ratios do you get? What's the extra latency of the
compression?
What's the tradeoff between compressing the data stream (above
TCP) v. s. individual packets? (The latter transmits the same
number of packets with or without compression, and some would
argue that the modern internet is *not* bandwidth limited but
is limited by packet-switching rates).
WAGs are fun, but we're designing a Protocol Standard here,
not tinkering in the basement...
Compression is useful for the ``last mile'' -- the local connection,
which is often dial-up, and hence limited to ~28.8Kbps. It might
be interesting to look at the packet size and type distributions,
to see just what it would buy us. After all, GIF files are not
compressible, and I suspect that by volume they make up a large
percentage of traffic over dial-up links. (N.B. I'm not trying
to be snide about people's viewing habits; I'm alluding to the cute
little pictures that seem to infest most Web pages...)