Compression..

[ro...@excc.exeter.ac.uk]

An outsider dares to comment on the recent childish outbreak.

First the specific issue. Kevin was *not* offering his compression
technology (which may well be an absolute miracle/complete dog) to
apache.org. He *was* saying that there was a technical error in
apachebench. I see from a recent post that that's been fixed.
Of course, it could be argued that he didn't point this out in
the most tactful way, whether by accident or design.

As for the compression issue, can we please avoid the "everybody else
is just like me" syndrome.

 Not all of us sit at the end of modems.

 For intercontinental access (remember that "WW"?) the international
 link is often the limiting factor.

 Local networks can congest: here in the UK academic community we
 found that a lot of sunsite UK usage was from North America..

 Many small servers are running on modern PCs which do have cycles to
 spare. Others are overloaded.

 On the client side, a lot of home PCs are now very fast. Some aren't.

 Given the number of compression programs/algorithms (compress, gzip,
 bzip2), people might not like having several copies of things lying
 around (think backups..).

What this all adds up to (I think) is that modems are not always the
limiting feature and that some sites would find it useful to
precompress whilst others prefer to do it on the fly. And there's
always that magical word "caching"..

Whilst there has been some discussion of this, there's been far more
abuse. I like to think that I'm smart enough and nice enough not to
resort to the latter  (my own flames are "incisive comments" of course
:-) and until recently I thought this mailing list was too. 

Are the words "usenet", "flame-war" and "troll" familiar?

John