Marcus Bointon wrote:
Not quite the same thing, but I ran into the opposite scenario recently. A simple scp of a 180Mb file between servers (dual dual Xeons) on a gigabit LAN. With compression (scp -C) it sustained about 12Mb/sec net throughput (15 sec to copy, i.e. CPU compression speed is limiting the rate), but without compression it did 70Mb/sec (just under 3 sec to copy - I was impressed! probably disk limited (U320, 10k)). i.e. if you have gigabit locally, the throughput comes much cheaper than compression. I suspect YMMV quite a lot, so it's probably worth benchmarking. 100Mbit can usually deliver around 10Mb/sec, so had I been on that, compression would have been the faster choice. Similar choices will apply to other protocols that support compression such as MySQL (client and slave traffic). Generally, gigabit rocks...
We use all gigabit. I think its just an apples to oranges thing here. You were transferring a big file, off disk, compressing on the fly. The PHP memcache client compresses in memory data, then transfers it over the wire.
Of course, you always want to benchmark your stuff. Someone off list tells me that "Nothing is fast in JAVA." Don't know, never touched the stuff. The real question is what is slower?
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