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Improving network efficiency in real-time groupware with general message compression

Published: 04 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Groupware communicates by sending messages across the network, and groupware programmers use a variety of formats for these messages, such as XML, plain text, or serialized objects. Although these formats have many advantages, they are often so verbose that they overload the system's network resources. Groupware programmers could improve efficiency by using more compact formats, but this efficiency comes at the cost of increased complexity, reduced convenience, and reduced readability. In this paper we propose an alternate approach for improving efficiency -- an automatic compression system that transparently minimizes verbose formats. Our general message compressor -- GMC -- automatically finds and removes redundancy in message streams, without any knowledge of the contents or structure of the message, and without any need for the programmer to change the way they work. In tests with realistic message traces, GMC reduced text messages to 20% of their original size, XML messages to 8% of the original, and serialized objects to 9%. Although not as compact as a hand-coded representation, GMC provides most of the compression benefits with almost none of the work -- it allows groupware programmers to use convenient message formats without compromising transport efficiency.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2006
548 pages
ISBN:1595932496
DOI:10.1145/1180875
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 November 2006

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Author Tags

  1. groupware performance
  2. message compression
  3. network delay

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CSCW06
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CSCW06: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 4 - 8, 2006
Alberta, Banff, Canada

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  • (2016)Performance Analysis of Web Systems Based on XMLHttpRequest, Server-Sent Events and WebSocketInformation Systems Architecture and Technology: Proceedings of 36th International Conference on Information Systems Architecture and Technology – ISAT 2015 – Part II10.1007/978-3-319-28561-0_6(71-83)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2016
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