superlifter design notes and a new proposal

[Paul Haas]

On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, Martin Pool wrote:

> When I talk about compressing message headers, I have in mind
> compressing everything that goes across the socket,

In my network, the links are slow, and the CPU's are fast, so I doubt
internal compression code could do much better than "ssh -C".

> Fast networks are a significant use case that ought to be considered.
> On GigE, having low processing overhead and being able to use things
> like sendfile() to transmit data are going to be enormously more
> important than the length of the header.

Which is another situation where compression code in rsync may not be a
win.

Is there a big real world CPU penalty for letting ssh do the compression?
That would mean uncompressed bits go over the local socket, but the
network links are compressed.

--
Paulh