RAPI Data Throttling

One of the significant changes of Windows Mobile 5 devices over the previous generation was the noticeable speedup of RAPI communications. My iPAQ 2210 just crawls when compared to the either the JasJar or the K-Jam (with a slower CPU). This means that it is much easier for me to test my remote database access code on the WM5 devices, but I still keep my pledge to support older devices like my pre-historic iPAQ 3850 with the Pocket PC 2002 OS. And this means slower RAPI connections.

The connection speed can be so slow to the point where loading a very large table from the iPAQ 2210 (on a CF card) to the new Console may take several minutes. In the case of the huge table I discussed before, this means a 15 minute load time. If you think like I do, this is unnacceptable. So how can we speed up the communication between the device and the desktop? Easy: ZIP it!

In my particular case this was quite easy. All of my remote database access products use the same device DLL that communicates with the desktop via RAPI, TCP/IP or even the serial port. Data is packaged in messages of varying sizes and, depending on their semantics, they are either dispatched immediately or grouped together in a 64 KB buffer and sent when it fills up. This seems to be the optimal size for RAPI connections (according to one slide deck from MEDC 2005). So what happens if you compress this buffer before sending it? In my case the data transfer time was cut to a third. Now the behemoth table downloads to the desktop in under 5 minutes.

Finally, the ZIP library I'm using was found in CodeProject. This code allows me to compress and uncompress to a memory buffer, making it perfect for my own purposes.