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.