[ubuntu-art] Recompressing PNGs to save space?
Frank Schoep
frank at ffnn.nl
Mon Apr 24 22:47:54 BST 2006
Hi all,
I've been fiddling around with the Dapper beta release and I tried an
experiment with the graphics data included with it.
I used a simple "find" statement and a Bash script to copy over all PNG images
in the default installation and recompressed all these images using a
combination of PNGRewrite, OptiPNG and AdvancePNG to see if there was any
space to be saved, the results of the recompression are as follows:
- original PNGs apparent bytes: 53.636.628
- recompressed apparent bytes: 38.185.898
- apparent bytes saved: 15.450.730
So, recompressing all distributed PNGs would save just over 15 megabytes in
the actual default installation. The results can also be expressed in
disk-blocks, since small files often take up a whole disk block the results
are quite surprising:
- original PNGs disk-blocks: 86.428
- recompressed disk-blocks: 72.012
- disk-blocks saved: 14.416
Looking at it this way, the recompression would save about fourteen and a half
thousand disk blocks. I also looked at how well the original and recompressed
PNGs would be archived using BZIP2:
- original PNGs bzip2 archive in bytes: 40.028.323
- recompressed PNGs bzip2 archive: 32.109.940
- archived bytes saved: 7.918.383
So, looking at the archived versions we can save eight megabytes by
recompressing the PNGs.
My actual question is this: is it worth it to optimize all PNGs by
recompressing them? It doesn't affect the appearance or content, it only
makes each file as small as possible.
By doing this, we could probably trim about seven megabytes off the install CD
(which amounts to 1% of the total size) and we can cut 15 megabytes off the
required hard disk space for installation. I think that because of the
smaller file sizes, there's also an actual performance benefit here (or is it
neglible?)
To give an indication on the amount of time required for recompression: it
took my Athlon 64 3200+ about 24 hours to recompress all PNGs included in the
Dapper beta default desktop installation.
Another proposition would be to build an automated PNG optimizer so that all
PNG in packages are automatically recompressed without any user intervention.
I hope my research interests some of you, if anything was unclear I'd be happy
to explain more of the process and the results. Just ask away!
With kind regards,
Frank Schoep
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