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I have a client server application that sends XML over TCP/IP from client to server and then broadcast out to other clients. How do i know at what the minimun size of the XML that would warrant a performance improvement by compression the XML rather than sending over the regular stream.
Are there any good metrics on this or examples?
Xml usually compresses very well, as it tends to have a lot of repetition.
Another option would be to swap to a binary format; BinaryFormatter or NetDataContractSerializer are simple options, but both are notoriously incompatible (for example with java) compared with xml.
Another option would be a portable binary format such as google’s "protocol buffers". I maintain a .NET/C# version of this called protobuf-net. This is designed to be side-by-side compatible with regular .NET approaches (such as XmlSerializer / DataContractSerializer), but is much smaller than xml, and requires significantly less processing (CPU etc) for both serialization and deserialization.
This page shows some numbers for XmlSerializer, DataContractSerializer and protobuf-net; I thought it included stats with/without compression, but they seem to have vanished…
[update] I should have said – there is a TCP/IP example in the QuickStart project.