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copied!<p><strong>FINAL UPDATE:</strong> The two libraries seem about equivalent. Zlib gives about 20% better compression, while LZO's decoding speed is about twice as fast, but the performance hit for either is very small, nearly negligible. That is my final answer. Thanks for all other answers and comments!</p> <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> After implementing LZO compression and seeing only sightly better performance, it is clear that my own code is to blame for the performance hit (massively increased number of scripted effects possible per packet, thus my effect "interpreter" is getting exercised a lot more.) I would like to humbly apologize for scrambling to shift blame, and I hope there are no hard feelings. I will do some profiling and then maybe I will be able to get some numbers which will be more useful to someone else. </p> <p>ORIGINAL POST: </p> <p>OK, I finally got around to writing some code for this. I started out with Zlib, here are the first of my findings. </p> <p>Zlib's compression is <em>insanely</em> great. It is reliably reducing packets of, say, 8.5 kib down to, say, 750 bytes or less, even when compressing with Z_BEST_SPEED (instead of Z_DEFAULT_COMPRESSION.) The compression time is also pretty good.</p> <p>However, I had no idea the decompression speed of <em>anything</em> could even possibly be this bad. I don't have actual numbers, but it must be taking 1/8 second per packet at least! (Core2Duo T550 @ 1.83 Ghz.) Totally unacceptable.</p> <p>From what I've heard, LZMA is a tradeoff of worse performance vs. better compression when compared to Zlib. Since Zlib's compression is already overkill and its performance is already incredibly bad, LZMA is off the table sight unseen for now. </p> <p>If LZO's decompression time is as good as it's claimed to be, then that is what I will be using. I think in the end the server will still be able to send Zlib packets in extreme cases, but clients can be configured to ignore them and that will be the default.</p>

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