Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] request BIP number for: "Support for Datastream Compression"

From: Johnathan Corgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 12:41:17 -0800

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 11:18 AM, Peter Tschipper via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> I opened a PR #6973 this morning for Zlib Block Compression for block
> relay and at the request of @sipa  this should have a BIP associated
> with it.   The idea is simple, to compress the datastream before
> sending, initially for blocks only but it could theoretically be done
> for transactions as well.  Initial results show an average of 20% block
> compression and taking 90 milliseconds for a full block (on a very slow
> laptop) to compress.  The savings will be mostly in terms of less
> bandwidth used, but I would expect there to be a small performance gain
> during the transmission of the blocks particularly where network latency
> is higher.
>

​The trade-off decisions among bandwidth savings, CPU performance, and
latency are local, and I think it shouldn't be assumed that any particular
node will want to support it.  I recommend that if P2P message compression
is implemented, it should be negotiated via the services field at
connection time.

-- 
Johnathan Corgan
Corgan Labs - SDR Training and Development Services
http://corganlabs.com