[PATCH 0/5] ZSTD compression support for OpenSSH

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote in
 <20200908195245.gs5ve6fsvbyseuhx at flow>:
 |On 2020-09-08 15:06:31 [+0200], Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote in
 |>  <20200908073415.ymmao6fcemn5hqns at flow>:
 |>|A key stroke is here 10 bytes of raw data which zstd compresses usually
 |>|into 10 bytes while zlib manages to squeeze it into 5 bytes. This leads
 |>|to better compression ratio for zlib in ssh's accounting (visible in
 |>|verbose mode after connection terminates). The data length, that will be
 |>|transferred over the wire, is the same for 5 and 10 bytes data after the
 |>|crypto part (with padding and so on). 
 |> 
 |> Then something must be wrong on the configuration side for sure.
 |> I personally have switched all possible private use cases to zstd
 |> years ago, in can be configured to be tremendously fast, faster
 |> even than lz4, no?, or compress almost as good as xz, it depends
 |> on the data, xz can surely outperform it in size.
 |> On the decompression side zstd is just tremendously fast.
 |> And all in one algorithm.
 |
 |I don't follow. A key stroke is one ssh packet which has 10 bytes.
 |This packet must be compressed in a way that it can be fully
 |decompressed once received on the remote side (ZSTD_e_flush in zstd
 |terms which finishes the current block). Due to the way framing works in
 |zstd we end up with a 10 bytes block. Higher compression levels can
 |achieve 9 bytes but as I stated it does not make sense due to padding of
 |the compressed data. The zlib framing is smaller here but then zstd
 |knows exactly how many bytes it will decompress and when the block/frame
 |ends.
 |
 |Do note that this is not simple file compression where you end up with
 |one frame and blocks created on demand.

I see.  Thanks for the explanation.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)