Martijn van Buul wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:24:37PM +0200, Peter I. Hansen wrote:
>  
> 
>>But, if you want to save space and bandwidth, like Zafer, bzip 
>>is the way to go.
> 
> 
> Actually, it's not. If you *really* don't care about the amount of CPU
> cycles spent on compressing/decompressing, you could always try p7zip; 
> it's in archivers/p7zip in pkgsrc.
> 
> Compressing the same testfile takes a staggering 5 minutes 41 seconds,
> but it compresses it down to 40MB - 24% of the original. *THAT* is what
> I call a considerable improvement over gzip. And the best part has yet
> to come: Extraction takes only 15 seconds. Still a lot more than gzip, but
> considerably less than bzip2!
> 

That's quite good. So, If I read your numbers correct, the p7zip
compression saves us 24 Mb at the expense of 8.8 seconds in
extra decompression time.

I have no idea what the average cpu is like, but I think using
that kind of compression for distribiting packages makes sense
in terms of bandwidth consideration.

If cpu cycles is everything to you, I'm with you all the way on
gzip.

-Peter