Re: caching and compression profiles?

[ eric rescolra added to thread... ]

eric - what's the story on TLS use of compression? is it automatic, if available? or is there some other "magic" involved.

ryan - i think that caching and compression are probably two different things.

caching is probably profile-specific in the sense that whatever does the caching has to understand the semantics of the profile in use on the channel.

compression is more general. i suppose you could do it either as a tuning profile (for the whole session) or on a per-channel basis. i can see advantages to each, but i'd prefer that the result look like this:

1. if you tune for privacy, then session-wide compression should just happen automatically, as a part of the security layer.

2. if you don't tune for privacy, then you may decide to tune for compression. it should be fairly easy to define a family of profiles to do this, e.g., http://.../zlib, http://.../my-whacky-compression, etc.

if someone feels strongly that compression ought to be done on a per-channel basis, then we'll finally get a chance to use BEEP's feature negotiation mechanism, because there'll have to be a way of letting the two sides negotiate the use of compression before they start adding a "Content-..." header to the messages they exchange over BEEP...

/mtr

> Has anyone thought about writing a zlib profile to do gzip compression? 
>  What about a profile to do caching?  Is there any reason profiles like 
> this couldn't be created?
> 
> It seems like a compression profile would be straightforward and useful 
> enough that someone may have already done this.
> 
> In my case I would like to send a large amount of xml messages (IDMEF) 
> from a client to a server.  Using gzip I can usually get around 30x 
> compression.  I'd imagine that XMill or some other approach could do 
> better.  For security reasons I'd like to use the tls profile (actually 
> the idxp profile with tls).  Besides network bandwidth there are 
> performance and security reasons why compression is attractive.
> 
>   I could turn on compression in openssl in both the client and the 
> server machines but that is implementation specific and not general 
>  purpose.  I could also compress/decompress the messages in the 
> applications - but this ties clients to servers and kinda defeats the 
> purpose of using an open format like IDMEF.  I think a compression 
> profile would be the best solution and allow peers to negotiate a 
> compression profile when it is available on the client and the server.
> 
> I did a quick search and found a refernce to a suggestion for a 
> compression profile in the mailing list archive, whatever happened to 
> that idea?
> If a compression profile could be written it wouldn't work very well 
> with small messages, that is where a caching profile might be useful - 
> cache messages and compress a bunch of them at once.
> 
> What do you people think?
> 
> Ryan
> 
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