speed of bzip2 versus gzip

[James Long]

Is it normal for bzip2 to be significantly slower than gzip?
If not, where can I look for things that might be causing
"bzip2 --fast" to take 50-60 times longer to compress a 
(sendmail log) file than gzip?

Thanks,

Jim


> ns : 07:52:06 /usr/tmp# time bunzip2 -c /var/log/maillog.0.bz2 > maillog
>
> real    1m43.574s
> user    1m26.846s
> sys     0m15.284s
> ns : 07:53:55 /usr/tmp# time gzip -c maillog > maillog.0.gz
>
> real    1m1.092s
> user    0m49.009s
> sys     0m6.682s
> ns : 07:56:56 /usr/tmp# time bzip2 -c maillog > maillog.0.bz2
> load: 1.00  cmd: bzip2 53621 [running] 1860.55u 1.82s 98% 8096k
> load: 1.00  cmd: bzip2 53621 [running] 5386.71u 5.30s 98% 8096k
>
> real    133m25.236s
> user    131m29.156s
> sys     0m7.744s
> ns : 10:10:36 /usr/tmp# time gzip -c maillog > maillog.1.gz
>
> real    1m1.208s
> user    0m52.356s
> sys     0m3.333s
> ns : 10:12:13 /usr/tmp# ls -l
> total 1576688
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  1590291797 Jul 20 07:53 maillog
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel     1845620 Jul 20 10:10 maillog.0.bz2
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    10761511 Jul 20 07:56 maillog.0.gz
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    10761511 Jul 20 10:12 maillog.1.gz
> ns : 10:12:17 /usr/tmp# time bzip2 -1 -c maillog > maillog.1.bz2
> load: 1.02  cmd: bzip2 62522 [running] 3073.92u 8.02s 98% 1836k
>
> real    55m48.149s
> user    54m40.118s
> sys     0m8.028s
> ns : 11:08:34 /usr/tmp# ls -l
> total 1586944
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  1590291797 Jul 20 07:53 maillog
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel     1845620 Jul 20 10:10 maillog.0.bz2
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    10761511 Jul 20 07:56 maillog.0.gz
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    10474338 Jul 20 11:08 maillog.1.bz2
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    10761511 Jul 20 10:12 maillog.1.gz