One more link, about variable-length vs fixed-length encodings: http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/undergrad/4ba2/presentation/xdrandber.html
(The HTML is a bit broken, view the source.) Basically they make the somewhat obvious point that variable-length encodings are much slower to handle than fixed-length. I don't know if the difference is so great that lzo encoding could produce a smaller result with less work. I wouldn't be surprised either way, actually. One way to look at it is this: in the case where you're CPU-bound, not network-bound, then you'll definitely want to use something like XDR. In the case where you're completely network-bound, then you probably want to use gzip -9 or even bzip2, and whether the underlying protocol is fixed or variable-length probably doesn't matter. So perhaps XDR plus compression is a good tradeoff across a wider domain. (Or perhaps not.) -- Martin -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html