speed of bzip2 versus gzip

[Norberto Meijome]

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:03:37 -0700
James Long <list at museum.rain.com> wrote:

> 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?

i never measured it to see if it is 50-60 times slower, but yes, gzip blows
bzip2 out of the water on speed. I wanted to use bzip2 to compress multi-GB
weblog files, but gzip beat it my miles, and bzip2 wasn't THAT much better @
compressing it to make it worth it.

The box I had tested this one was a Dual Opteron 250, 4 GB RAM, SATA drives
gmirrored, FreeBSD 6.1 (or 2), amd64. 

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