Re: HEADS UP: bzip2(1) compression for manpages, Groff and Texinfo docs

From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013_at_student.uu.se>
Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 00:24:22 +0200
On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 12:34:58AM +0300, Narvi wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 7 May 2003, Erik Trulsson wrote:
> 
> > > which is a quite significant difference. I picked the file because of size
> > > and not change of compression ratio, or check all the files (just in case
> > > there are any benchmarking paranoids around). On the speed side, the speed
> > > of bunzip2 only matters if the speed difference between it and gunzip were
> > > user perceptible on even not really up to date at all hardware, which is
> > > not the case AFAICT.
> >
> > Here you are wrong.  On old hardware the difference in speed (and the
> > difference in memory needed) between bunzip2 and gunzip is quite
> > noticable.
> >
> 
> So... how old hardware are you talking about?

What I consider old is essentially stuff that is more than 10 years
old.  5 year old machines are not old in my opinion. (Yes, I know that
many people consider 5 year old computers to be old and obsolete.
I consider such people to be quite ridiculous.)

A couple of datapoints, using your example of gcc.info compressed with
both gzip and bzip2:

On my main machine, a Pentium 166/MMX, which I don't consider to be
particularly old, and definitely not even close to obsolete, gunzip
took less than one second to uncompress the file while bunzip2 took a
bit over 5 seconds.  I would call that difference quite noticable.

On my other FreeBSD machine, a 386sx/33, which I will admit is getting
a bit old but not yet obsolete, gunzip required 7 seconds to uncompress
the .gz file while bunzip2 required over a minute to uncompress the
.bz2 file.  Very noticable difference.




-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013_at_student.uu.se
Received on Wed May 07 2003 - 13:24:28 UTC

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