bzip vs gzip
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.
--
- Shane King <thandor@ihug.com.au> <ICQ#:2492866>
<http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~thandor/>
"If a machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we
can too." - Sarah Connor, Terminator II: Judgement Day.
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