If large amounts of compressable data is transferred over RMI, then valid question to ask is if compression would make any benefit there. However, before going into compression of the outputstream, first thing is to do algorithmic changes to reduce traffic. I.e. no compresion can match algorithm which avoids reduntant traffic completely. Also compression adds extra overhead into communication by requiring additional memory in both ends for (un)compress.
- Serialization and compression
- RMI-USERS archives — March 2001 (#186)
- CompressedOutputStream: Appearently simply adding Gzip or Zip output stream into RMI layer would be very bad idea due to inapproriate flushing policy.