compressing socket send data

Question

I'm trying to send a lot of data(basically data records converted to a string) over a socket and its slowing down the performance of the rest of my program. Is it possible to compress the data using gzip etc. and uncompress it at the other end?

Answer 1

Yes. The easiest way to implement this is to use the venerable zlib library.

The compress() and uncompress() utility functions may be what you're after.

Answer 2

Yes, but compression and decompression have their costs as well.

You might want to consider using another process or thread to handle the data transfer; this is probably harder than merely compressing, but will scale better when your data load increases n-fold.