On Tue, 08 Jun 1993 07:50:05 EDT, you said:
Certainly, compression seems very attractive if you ignore the costs it
incurs and only look at the costs it saves.
There is cpu and wall time spent [de]compressing, there is decreased
interoperability, there is increased complexity in the protocol; all these
things have costs, too.
A very true point. However, I think it's just a *touch* hubristic
for us to decide what the break-even point is, especially absent
any clear-cut technical merit (for example, the exact reasons why
the working group declared nested encodings A Bad Thing).
Of course, having decided against nested encodings for valid but
arcane reasons, this forced us into placing what at first seem to
be arbitrary restrictions on message/partial. What comes around, goes around.
In any case - do any of us have a working crystal ball, so we can
see what the relative balances of CPU cost, disk space, network
bandwidth, backward compatibility, and all....
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Engineer
Virginia Tech