Patent ID: 7877517

Claim:
A method, comprising: determining a compression performance value for a compression algorithm to use to compress data at a source node to transmit to a target node over a network, wherein the compression performance value is based on measured compression performance information comprising a measured compression throughput rate at the source node and a measured decompression throughput rate at the target node; determining network performance of the network based on a measured network transmission rate; determining a compression ratio (CR) resulting when the compression algorithm compresses the data to transmit; comparing the determined compression performance value to a ratio of the network performance and the CR to determine whether to compress the data, wherein the ratio of the network performance and the CR is calculated according to an equation comprising 2*NTR/(1−CR), wherein NTR is the measured network transmission rate; compressing the data in response to determining to compress the data; transmitting the compressed data to the target node over the network in response to compressing the data; and transmitting the data to the target node uncompressed in response to determining not to compress the data.