Bug#137709: feature request: gzip /var/lib/apt/lists/*
On Sun, 10 Mar 2002, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> Package: apt
> Version: 0.5.4
>
> This directory takes up a lot of space, but the packages files it
> contains are highly compressible (about 75% can be saved on one of my
> systems). This may not be much of an issue on large modern machines
> but I still have one system which is short of disk space.
>
>
> Space may not be the only consideration. I recall that when the idea
> of compressing man pages originally came up on debian-devel, tests
> showed that the compressed versions actually rendered faster even on a
> 486: the reduction in disk access required more than compensated for
> the extra CPU used.
>
> Of course this is a different application, so the results may differ,
> but it could be worth investigating.
Not possible. Jason has told me awhile ago that apt mmaps the lists, when it
accesses the .bins.
Of course, when lots of Packages files are downloaded, there can be lots of
duplicate info. Maybe having a string table, which would allow these files to
be stored compresses, would be worth it.
On a performance note, dpkg has support for reading status/available, either
with mmap, or with block reads(apt only uses mmap). My performance testing
showed the difference in speed, with a sufficiently large block size, was just
noise.
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