Patent ID: 8499100

Claim:
A system, comprising: a server device having stored thereon a file; and a first network device having processor that is programmed to perform actions comprising: receiving the file from the server device; compressing a first portion of the file using a first compression mode; evaluating a criteria comprising a normalized weighting of a combination of at least a system load metric and a data compression ratio metric, the normalization being such that no one metric dominates the criteria; selectively selecting a second compression mode and compressing a second portion of the file based on the evaluation of the criteria, wherein the second compression mode is different from the first compression mode; and selectively transmitting to one of a second network device or a client device, an expected file length that is computed based in part on a combination of the compressed portions of the file and an uncompressed portion of the file, the uncompressed portion to be subsequently compressed prior to a subsequent transmission to the second network device or the client device.