About rsync over SSH and compression

JCA 1.41421 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 26 02:03:58 AEST 2019


Rsync supports the capability of compressing data before sending. So does
OpenSSH. It would be probably be a waste of resources and time to enable
both compression capabilities at the same time, but it is not clear to me
whether, in general, it makes better sense to enable rsync compression or
SSH compression.

My first thought would be that SSH compression might yield better results,
on the ground that SSH will try to cram as much data as possible in a
channel data message, within the limitations imposed by the maximum SSH
message size and the current window size. On the other hand, rsync might
(and 'might' is the keyword here) resort to individual
SSH2_MSG_CHANNEL_DATA messages for particular deltas, thus giving the
compression code smaller amounts of data to play with every time.
Additionally, SSH compression will be able to compress the rsync protocol
control data, which rsync will not be able to compress (right?)

Feedback on the issues above will be much appreciated.


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