Re: Question : Compress files to send with NFS4.1

[bfields@fieldses.org (J. Bruce Fields)]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 04:06:11PM +0200, Cedric Blancher wrote:
> On 7 April 2016 at 15:27, Martin Houry <martinhoury@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is NFS4.1 capable to compress files before sending them on the network
> > and decompress them on the destination to speed up the file transfert?
> 
> You can get that with IP tunnel compression. Trouble is, NFS
> (v2/v3/v4; and younger protocol designers are even worse by telling
> you 'dunno care about high latency [ > 4 sec roundtrip ] any more'
> [yeah? wanna pester? old RFS and AFS did a better job...]) are highly
> sensitive to latency, and like ssh the high latency causes more
> trouble than its worth.

The only feature the protocol has that's a little bit like compression
is READ_PLUS (in 4.2), which can tell the client that a range of the
file is a hole instead of returning all the zeroes.  You could think of
that as a specialized kind of compression for sparse files.  Even there
we've been having some trouble ensuring there aren't performance
regressions.

--b.