speed of bzip2 versus gzip

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jul 20, 2007, at 5:37 PM, Norberto Meijome 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.

Thanks for the feedback, Norberto.

Of course, it all depends on what your priorities are, too-- if what  
you want is a final tarball which is being mirrored and downloaded  
frequently, then your goal is to obtain the absolute best  
compression, and how much CPU --best takes isn't important.

Comparing the default (-5 compression?) of gzip to bzip2 would  
probably be more reasonable if you care about reasonably timely  
compression.

-- 
-Chuck