Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Michael Poole]

Aigars Mahinovs writes:

> On 12/7/05, Mikael Eriksson <mikael.miffe.eriksson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I wrote some benchmarking script, please see the attached file.
> > If we recompress all packages from breezy main i386 beginning with a with
> > 7zip we save 8MB on filesize. But some files are smallest as tar.gz.
> 
> 8 Mb out of 44 Mb, which makes 17.8 % less, at the same time
> de(?)compression time seams to have increased 2.36 times. The
> compression is there, but is the time increase worth it?

In addition to what Phillip Susi said about CD-ROM versus CPU speed,
consider network times.  The total time taken is Package Size /
Bandwidth + Unpack Time.  This is smaller for 7zip when the network
takes at least 11 seconds to transfer 8 MB -- up to about 5.7 Mbps.

Michael Poole