speeding up scripts by not gzipping stuff?

[Josip Rodin <joy@cibalia.gkvk.hr>]

Hi,

The load on www-master.d.o often worries me. I run top ever now and then and
notice all those glimpses and search_*.pls, it's sickening :)

So I've wondered...

[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% time gunzip -c Contents-i386.gz >/dev/null
gunzip -c Contents-i386.gz > /dev/null  1.70s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 1.746 total
[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% time gunzip -c Contents-i386.gz >/dev/null
gunzip -c Contents-i386.gz > /dev/null  1.71s user 0.02s system 100% cpu 1.725 total

[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% zcat Contents-i386.gz > foo

[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% time grep sshd foo >/dev/null
grep sshd foo > /dev/null  0.21s user 0.56s system 102% cpu 0.753 total
[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% time grep sshd foo >/dev/null
grep sshd foo > /dev/null  0.22s user 0.15s system 100% cpu 0.368 total
[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% time grep sendmail foo >/dev/null
grep sendmail foo > /dev/null  0.11s user 0.17s system 100% cpu 0.278 total
[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% time grep ls foo >/dev/null
grep ls foo > /dev/null  0.48s user 0.23s system 86% cpu 0.825 total

So it seems we'd save quite a bit of time if we extracted the gzipped files.

[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% zcat `find . -name \*.gz` | wc -c | tail -1
608331648
[joy@klecker:~/packages/contents/unstable]% df `pwd -r` -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/rd/c0d0p3         46G   26G   18G  59% /org

Would anyone mind if I unpacked those 580 MB and kept them that way?

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.