Re: [freenet-devl] integrating zlib compression into freenet

[Ian Clarke]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 02:05:18AM -0700, Aaron Voisine wrote:
> looking at the code, the simplest way to implement zlib compression is to
> change line 39 of Freenet/client/Document.java to read:
> 
> this.data = new GZIPInputStream(source);
> 
> (you'd also have to add import java.util.zip.* near the top to get it to 
> compile)

I really don't think this is a good idea, given that the vast majority
of data on Freenet will already be compressed (jpg, mpeg, mp3, etc), and
thus trying to gzip them will be a waste of time and processing
resources.  The only things that might benefit from compression like
this are HTML and TXT files, which make up an extremely small proportion
of documents in Freenet.  Allowing these to be compressed would be a bad
idea as it would make any content which used this compression scheme
unreadable on older versions of the client.

It isn't worth it,

Ian.

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