Re: bzip vs gzip
On Sun, Mar 28, 1999 at 12:32:00PM +1000, Shane King wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 27, 1999 at 06:22:34PM -0800, Oscar Levi wrote:
> > Please recognize that the decompression performance of bzip2 is
> > substantially worse. For the source archive of the 2.2.1 kernel, the
> > decompression goes from 4.4 seconds to 29.2 seconds--300MHz PII, four
> > samples averaged.
> >
> > IMHO, even the 25% space improvement may not be worth the order of
> > magnitude performance loss.
>
> On the other hand, the kernel archive is in the order of 10mb gzipped. So
> bzip2 saves you 2.5mb.
>
> Now on a modem link, there isn't any way you can hope to download that
> extra 2.5mb in the extra 25 seconds it will take to unzip a .bz2 file. In
> fact, it's likely to take around 15 minutes. In this case, bzip2 makes a
> heck of a lot of sense. (Not to mention the reduced storage space
> requirements are nice too).
>
> I think until most people have a T1 into their living room and terabyte
> hard drives that anything that cuts down file size is most likely worth
> the performance tradeoff.
An alternative is to buy CDs instead of downloading the (source)
packages. If I am trying to build a new distribution, the extra time
to decompress the source packages is *much* more significant than the
additional storage requirement.
Still, it is not an obvious call.
-O
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