r41Beta5

[Chris Muller]

I have just posted r41Beta5 to the MagmaTester project of squeaksource.

Testing on slow networks has revealed compression can make a
significant improvement!  However, compressing *everything* can be
wasteful for very small ByteArray's.  The lz compression adds a
20-byte header, so it is really wasteful with tiny requests/responses
for both computers to go through compression/decompression cost while
INCREASING the number of bytes to send over the network.

So I went ahead and chose an arbitrary threshold of 200 bytes.  Any
request/response over 200 bytes will be compressed.  This threshold
can be tweaked if necessary, but the benchmark results are really good
compared to all-compression or no-compression.  Magma now basically
maintains the framework-oscillation rate at the high level we get on
fast networks, while still providing exceptional benefit for slow
networks.

Also available is a new version of Magma Tools.  There are several
improvements to the benchmarker.

- Now reporting totals for MagmaBenchmarker.  Also including the
Client Session Statistics Report, subtotaled by benchmark test!
- Also included is the Server Statistics Report.
- The statistics report also now includes versions of *all* packages
instead of just MagmaTester.
- Now disconnecting the session after running the test!

The cumulative performance enhancements for r41 are starting to
accumulate into a significant overall improvement!

Enjoy,
  Chris