RFC and compression

[Former Member]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to verify whether the table parameters in my remote function calls are really getting compressed.

The documentation states that prior to version 4.6 tables passed as parameter to remote functions greater

than 8000 bytes were compressed and newer versions use compression already from 2000 bytes on.

I disabled compression in SM59 and also switched off the "Slow RFC connection" on my client's destination

but I don't see any performance degradation. I also increased the size of my table parameters to make sure

they are beyond limits, but no change in performance. Since I can't slow things down by disabling

compression I am asking myself whether compression was on in the first place. Anyone out there who could help?

Best regards,
Christian

PS: I am using sapnwrfc.dll version 7.20 patch 416 on my client, which should be fairly recent.

[Former Member]

Hi Christian,

how do you measure the "performance"?

Several key performance indicators may evaluated:

- transmission volume per time, troughput [kb/s]
- RFC calls per second [1/s]
- getting results availible after call (latency) result timepoint - call timepoint [s]
- CPU load on sender/receiver side (for compression)

- TCP/IP netwerk load (fragments)

We checked this option in former times also and made some analysis and came to the conclusion that is not really relevant if things < x kb are compressed or not if you are working in a LAN. If you have a phone line with 56k modem, it might make sense.

If you really need the feeling that something changed if you change compression settings, you may use a network packet analyzer and a controlled environment to test and see the packets over network.

But overall, if something feels slow, 98% it is not the network compression feature.

Regards,

Matthias

[Former Member]

Hi Matthias,

typically, the data from my tables can be compressed by a factor of almost 10:1 which should make a noticable difference in network load. Unfortunately, I don't see any difference when I enable/disable compression. I cannot find any client side (connection-) property or the like, which would indicate, that the connection uses compression. So my only option seems to look at the traffic in a packet sniffer. The sapnwrfc.dll is available already for some time and I wonder whether anyone else has had the same problem before.

Best regards,
Christian