Since you have the option to use SSH 2 protocol it's preferable to use it, rather than insecure rsh command. Your command for listing the remote folder is OK, I use this kind of "automation" every day. The thing with -C flag is that compress all the data that the client sends or receives - so, you invoke a command, there is a data sent to the server, and this data is being compressed on the fly. Since SSH is encrypted by default, it doesn't make sense to use this option at all, plus you have fast network.
One yeah ago I have done performance benchmark against OpenSSH - when using -C flag you actually loose performance, so just don't use it