Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Michael Poole]

Sam Tygier writes:

> Michael Poole wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> most installs involve multiple files.
> 
> you equations is correct if all the downloads are done, and then all the decompression is done.
> 
> as downloading and decompressing require different resources (bandwidth, cpu), these could be effectivly parallelized. after a package is downloaded (or read from cd) it joins a decompression queue. even more time saving :-)

They could be, but currently are not.  With that kind of pipelining,
though, a savings in download time is even more of a win -- the slower
decompressor would only be a factor for the last package or if it were
slower than the download for other packages.

Michael Poole