The best performance when accessing (reading or writing) a CDF will occur when that CDF is in the host encoding of the computer being used (and host decoding is in effect --- see Section 2.2.9). This is because no encoding or decoding has to be performed by the CDF library. A CDF that must be portable between two or more different types of computers should normally be network encoded. There may be cases, however, where it would be desirable to create a CDF with host encoding (e.g., on a slow machine) and then transfer it to a faster machine for processing or conversion to another encoding. Obviously, there are trade-offs as to which encoding should be used in any one particular case. Keep in mind that a CDF can always be converted to the host encoding of the machine being used (with CDFconvert) before being accessed.