SSH Compression - Block Deduplication

[Matt Olson]

Dan,

All perfectly valid points.

Nomachine, being a commercial product, is not likely to achieve ubiquity.

I agree that SSH may not be the ideal layer.  SSH support for X11 
forwarding implies some level of interest by the community in X11 
tunneling.  The thought behind implementing deduplication is that it is 
likely a significant aid to X11 traffic and may provide some benefit to 
other workloads as well.

I may look around and see if I can find a library that does another layer 
of tunneling or a Xorg addon to provide deduplication.

Thanks for your comments.

Matt


On Fri, 9 Sep 2011, Dan Kaminsky wrote:

> 
> Deduplication is a fairly domain specific technology -- it works well for files that are shared across multiple users (a context that's about as
> distant from SSH as you can imagine) and for a few protocols that move large blocks of data repeatedly (X11).  But even in the latter case,
> efficient protocols like NoMachine's do much better, as they're deeply protocol aware.  SSH is most likely the wrong layer for this work -- in
> general, gzip captures most of the compression gain, and in the specific cases where it doesn't, the work is too specific to be done generically
> (thus special accelerators for each protocol in WAN gear).
>