Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Olafur Arason]

These is with a directory of pdf and zip(sxw) files:

pdf.tar            103434240
pdf.tar.gz (9)    69866068 (68%)
pdf.tar.rz  (9)    49861918 (48%)
pdf.tar.7z          61108560 (59%)
pdf.tar.bz2 (9)   66184262 (64%)

Decompression speed:
gzip:
real    0m18.956s
user    0m5.016s (100%)
sys     0m1.280s
rzip:
real    0m22.850s
user    0m18.228s (364%)
sys     0m3.876s
7zip:
real    0m34.894s
user    0m18.980s (379%)
sys     0m1.816s
Bzip2:
real    0m58.077s
user    0m45.248s (903%)
sys     0m2.628s


Compression speed:
gzip:
real    1m6.055s
user    0m55.064s (100%)
sys     0m1.812s
rzip:
real    5m0.704s
user    3m32.812s (387%)
sys     0m6.508s
7zip:
rreal    6m1.161s
user    5m19.064s (580%)
sys     0m4.652s
Bzip2:
real    5m10.499s
user    4m19.440s (471%)
sys     0m3.424s

Rzip seems to be the all around winner in this example, but this
is a big file
So here is language-pack-de-base dpkg -x'ed
language-pack-de-base.tar              5304320
language-pack-de-base.tar.gz (9)    1789610   (38%)
language-pack-de-base.tar.rz (9)    1475416    (28%)
language-pack-de-base.tar.7z         1268400    (24%)
language-pack-de-base.tar.bz2  (9) 1551454   (29%)

So 7zip is the winner here.
Let's try it on a binary like openoffice2-core:
.tar             114145280
.tar.gz (9)     37508076  (33%)
.tar.rz (9)      32869860  (29%)
.tar.7z           23937047  (21%)
.tar.bz2 (9)    33682672  (30%)

So 7zip seems to be the best overall, but if you have big
text files then rzip is for you. But 7zip has horrible
compression speed.

Olafur Arason

2005/12/9, Tristan Wibberley <maihem at maihem.org>:
> Mikael Eriksson wrote:
>
> > After running my script on a lot of packages i see a pattern. Really
> > small debs, ~2000 bytes large benefit most for gzip -9 compression. And
> > everything else benefits most for 7z compression.
>
> How does rzip fare? It uses a lot of memory on really large files
> (multi-hundred MB), but is really, really good at compressing.
>
> http://rzip.samba.org/
>
> --
> Tristan Wibberley
>
>
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