On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> Frederick Bruckman writes:
>> On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Carl Brewer wrote:
>>> Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I've seen it too. A work-around seems to be to disable compression,
>>>> or reduce it -- with "deflate 9", I don't get that anymore at all.
>>>> The problem may be fixed in current and NetBSD 2.0, as they have a
>>>> newer version of pppd, but I haven't tried them yet for this.
>>>
>>> I'll give that a try and see how it goes.  Won't that kill
>>> some performance though?
>
> A lot will depend on your traffic mix.  For many people, the bulk of
> the bytes come from jpg and gif files, and those aren't further
> compressed by pppd.  OTOH, Powerpoint and Word files are huge and
> compress very well, which probably says something about the actual
> semantic content of most of them...

Even with something that compresses really well, such as newsgroup 
headers, the difference between "deflate 9" and "deflate 15" is barely 
noticable. For web surfing, the difference is even less noticable, 
though compression vs. no compression is still noticable with some 
sites, I feel, but not by much. Most of the complaints on the order of 
"this web site is slow" are caused by the server(s), not your link.

Frederick