Re: Debian Mirror with lzma compressed packages

[Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp>]

Hi,

> > I'm not sure if the smaller size that LZMA allows is worth it if it then
> > takes a lot longer to unpack files, or if it becomes impossible to do so
> > due to memory requirements.
> 
> i don't know on memory requirements. but i didn't notice any speed drawbacks
> for my personal use.


Last I checked, bzip2 requires a lot of memory to decompress. It's
documented in bzip2 manpage.  8MB is still a large number considering
embedded devices and Debian running on virtual machines.  How about
LZMA ?

bzip2:
                  Compress   Decompress   Decompress   Corpus
           Flag     usage      usage       -s usage     Size

            -1      1200k       500k         350k      914704
            -2      2000k       900k         600k      877703
            -3      2800k      1300k         850k      860338
            -4      3600k      1700k        1100k      846899
            -5      4400k      2100k        1350k      845160
            -6      5200k      2500k        1600k      838626
            -7      6100k      2900k        1850k      834096
            -8      6800k      3300k        2100k      828642
            -9      7600k      3700k        2350k      828642


lzma manpage claims:

       LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm) is an improved version
       of famous LZ77 compression algorithm. It was improved in way of
       maximum increasing of compression ratio, keeping high
       decompression speed and low memory requirements for
       decompressing.

But it doesn't elaborate much on memory consumption.

regards,
	junichi
-- 
dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp}   Debian Project