[wplug] compression

[Patrick Wagstrom]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 20:15 -0400, Bryon Gill wrote:
> The Quicktime file was already heavily compressed, so it spent a lot of effort 
> for negative gain.  Try again with a more compressible file (an enormous text 
> file for instance) and see if you don't get better results.

On a high speed connection, you won't get much of any result.  For
example, there really is no need for compression on a 100 megabit
network (or even 10 megabit) because the extra overhead of compressing
the file frequently slows down the transfer.   But for a lower bandwidth
network (100kbps or below), you get a benefit on files that can be
compressed.

Compression doesn't solve all the worlds problems, but can be helpful
for low-moderate bandwidth links and I would think it would be helpful
for a general purpose SFTP setup.  Although, if you're setting it up to
share music files (CC licensed of course) or video clips (under fair use
terms) there isn't much benefit because of the inherent compression.

--Patrick