~12% bandwidth conservation from compressed tunnel

I am getting minimal bandwidth in this location, downloading at around 30KB/s.  So I tried proxying my web traffic through a compressed ssh tunnel to see if it would help at all.

Here are the results after my morning browsing, about 1.5hrs of email, forums, texting, etc.

Transferred: sent 3073844, received 49053108 bytes, in 5189.2 seconds
Bytes per second: sent 592.3, received 9452.9
debug1: compress outgoing: raw data 3526015, compressed 2997278, factor 0.85
debug1: compress incoming: raw data 55577970, compressed 48936925, factor 0.88

that’s about 49MB compressed, or 56MB uncompressed. The compression factor of 0.88 in the stats says the traffic was reduced about 12%.  At very slow xfer rates I’ll take what I can get.

Note:  since the connection can be intermittent, I run the autossh wrapper to start the tunnel and screen utility at the other end.    Free tools in your local neighborhood linux distro.