Re: Best practice for data encoding?

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com>]

On 7-jun-2006, at 22:38, Dave Cridland wrote:

> I think it's worth noting that nobody is preventing you from using  
> XML over a compressed channel, which tends to increase XML's  
> efficiency rather sharply.

[...]

> Wire efficiency, for the most part, needs to take place by avoiding  
> the transmission of information entirely, rather than trying to  
> second-guess the compression.

Obviously adding compression doesn't help processing efficiency.

I've long harbored the suspicion that a large percentage of the  
cycles in today's fast CPUs are burned up parsing various types of  
text. Does anyone know of any processing efficiency comparisons  
between binary and text based protocols?

> As an example, IMAP and ACAP streams compress by around 70% on my  
> client - and that's trying to be bandwidth efficient in its  
> protocol usage. I've seen figures of 85% talked about quite  
> seriously, too.

And you think that's a good thing? Now I understand why it takes me  
up to 10 minutes to download a handful of 1 - 2 kbyte emails with  
IMAP (+SSL) over a 9600 bps GSM data connection.

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