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On Friday 07 February 2003 10:51, Robin Berjon wrote:
> Alaric B. Snell wrote:
> > On Friday 07 February 2003 09:24, Robin Berjon wrote:
> >>I certainly hope that future improvements on our binary format will in
> >> fact make it compress badly :) That should happen by making it more
> >> compact than it currently is (while keeping similar speed, which is why
> >> compression is not always an option).
> >
> > Nooo! It's not the compression *ratio* that matters here. It's the
> > eventual size.
>
> To you perhaps. An improved binary infoset removing yet more redundant
> information by itself will be likely to generate less compressible data,
> and the ratio matters in cost/benefit analysis.
But what matters is the end to end result.
The un-gzipped binary or textual format is an intermediate format, right? At
one end you have your Infoset in memory, at the other end you have a string
of bytes to go on the wire.
The size of the intermediate formats used only matters with regards to buffer
consumption - and the intermediate data structures used in gzip and bzip2 are
pretty large themselves!
> If I have (completely arbitrary numbers):
> bix 10k
> bix+gz 8k
> better-bix 8.5k
> better-bix+gz 7.8k
>
> Then even though the last one is the smallest, option 3 will be de-encoded
> a *lot* faster. At some point the different between a compressed binfoset
> and an uncompressed one becomes too marginal to be interesting.
Oh, I agree; I'm with you there. I'd rather not gzip at all. My point was
about people comparing gzipped XML with $binary_format and then saying "See?
Why bother with the binary format? gzipped XML is smaller!".
My counterthrust being that the non-gzipped binary format will be much less
resource intensive to process, and not much more resource intensive to
transmit over the Internet; and if the latter is a real problem then gzipped
binary will be smaller and easier to process than gzipped xml, if you can
afford to go around gzipping things.
I think we agree though, from your last statement :-)
ABS
--
A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
- ARP
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