[CF-Devel] Compression

[crossfire-devel at archives.real-time.com]

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Mitch Obrian wrote:
>
     
      I was wondering if on-the-fly gzip compression could
     
     >
     
      be added to crossfire, since much of the traffic is
     
     >
     
      text based map data. Routienes could be pulled from
     
     >
     
      mozilla or midnight commander to implement it.
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      Thoughts? (Would speed things up for dialup users).
     
     
  Technically, anything is possible.  However, this would be near the bottom of 
my list for a few reasons:

1) Within the server itself, most packets as composed are individually quite 
small, so compressing them is not likely to be any gain, and could in fact be a 
loss.  So to do sensible compression, a bit of logic would need to be 
re-arranged (server woudl basically have to gather all data is needs to send, 
know when it is done gathering that data, then compress it and send it along)

2) Perhaps the biggest user of bandwidth could be the images - png is already a 
compressed format, so running compression on that is no gain.

2) Second biggest is map data, which is actually binary - it could benefit from 
some compression, as I'm sure there is some amount of redundancy, but to say it 
is text is incorrect - the only bit that is text is the 'map1' portion of the 
protocol - basically everything after that is binary.

3) If I recall, most modems actually do their own compression, so putting 
compression on top of that is no gain.

4) If I recall, most ppp or like connection software can also do compression. 
Once again, compressing on top of that is no gain.

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