speed of bzip2 versus gzip

[Norberto Meijome]

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:50:20 -0700
Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:

> 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.

of course ... in my case i had  to sacrifice the space in order to finish
the job in less than 24 hours :) 

The better compression on bzip2 part isn't linear (in my tests) with the amount
of time it takes to achieve it. I bet there are some knobs to modify amount of
buckets or other memory related settings in bzip2 to make work faster... 

if not, maybe another algorithm...but [bg]zip are so widespread they may become
the one choice if you have to distribute the files to a wider audience.

_________________________
{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

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