Re: Pipelining and compression effect on HTTP/1.1 proxies

At 02:43 PM 4/22/97 -0700, David W. Morris wrote:
>On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, Benjamin Franz wrote:
>
>> majority of people browsing are doing so over modem links that *already*
>> perform pretty good on the fly compression of the data flowing through
>> them - thus reducing the potential savings to the end user from
>> pre-compressing text/* to negligible.
>
>But the user's modem link is only one of many hops between the user and
>the server so I don't agree that the fact of modem compression on one hop
>negates the importance of compression of the original material. 

Most modem dial-up links employ PPP to initiate their connection and PPP
compression, as implemented in Win95 and NT, negates most if not all of the
effects of modem (v.42bis) compression.

A bigger-picture issue for compressing HTML is the potential to reduce the
number of IP packets traveling over those 'hops'. This is an effect that
neither PPP nor modem compression can offer. The fewer packets handled at
each hop, the more capacity available for other traffic at those hops and
thus, more overall network improvement. That is, the raw 'local' efficiency
of the compression is not the only benefit, even when that efficiency is
relatively low.

[snip...]

Regards,

Bob Monsour
rmonsour@hifn.com

Received on Tuesday, 22 April 1997 16:52:49 UTC