Guix, While reading (guix scripts offload) in a (failed) attempt to get offloading working, the following comment caught my eye: ;; We rely on protocol-level compression from libssh to optimize large data ;; transfers. Warn if it's missing. which means that we're not currently doing our own compression inside the tunnel. This is significant, because it means that the COMPRESS-LEVEL field of BUILD-MACHINE is completely bogus[0], and probably always was - unless it once supported SSHv1, which I think we can agree is not something we want to support today. Nobody's offloading libreoffice to that old router in the attic. I'd like to undocument the option, and add a comment noting its lack of any useful effect to the code, by next week. Kind regards, T G-R [0]: Take a look at OpenSSH's readconf.c, packet.c, and all calls to start_compression_out().