[p4] Perforce tunnel performance

[R. Tyler Ballance]

I was reading through the ten minute pitch (http://www.perforce.com/ 
pitch/page03.html specifically) killing time waiting for a Windows  
machine to finish downloading p4report.exe, and I was struck by the  
sentence regarding the p4 protocol: "Designed to be efficient over  
long-latency networks such as WANs and the Internet, Perforce's  
protocol handles worldwide software development companies with ease."

This got me wondering, I very often develop while traveling, or on  
somebody else's wireless network, usually these networks have a  
_horrednous_ lag, combined with my p4 server's location, my  
experience syncing and submitting large changelists are  
always...interesitng, which leads me to the question:

I tunnel my communications to the perforce server over SSH, does this  
negate any of the "optimizations" Perforce claims to have made for  
high latency WAN environments? Since I'm either working on the same  
network the server is own, or great distances (network hops) away,  
how can I improve tunneled perforce performance? Is it even necessary?

I keep some third party RPMs inside my p4 repository, and I've  
forgotten to sync my notebook before leaving the office, leaving me  
to sync ~40MB of binary data while on one of the aforementioned high  
latency wireless networks, so any ways to improve speed would be great.

Cheers

R. Tyler Ballance: Lead Mac Developer at bleep. software
contact: tyler at bleepsoft.com | jabber: tyler at jabber.geekisp.com