[crossfire] Protocol & compression.

[Brendan Lally]

On 3/27/06, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
>   I just ran a quick test (find . -name "*.png" -exec gzip -vc {} > /dev/null
> \;) , and this is a somewhat typical result of the entire arch tree:
>
<snip>
>   Some files not compressible, some marginally compressible, and some very
> compressible.

I had a play with pngcrush, to see if the same space savings couldn't
be achieved in the arch tree itself, I ran PNG crush on all the png
files, then compared the filesizes before and after. I dumped a list
of all the images which are reduced in size by 10 bytes or more at
http://pastebin.ca/47176 (I strongly suspect that any gain less than
this is likely to be completely wiped out by those clients which need
to recache the image after it changes, and indeed, the threshold at
which that is true may well be closer to 50-100 bytes)

Note however, that the images which most benefited from this are /not/
the same ones that gzip seems to be able to compress well. (if anyone
wants to try and recreate this, I used pngcrush -fix -l 9 with version
1.5.10) - I think this is something to do with palette utilisation in
indexed images.