zstd compression for packages

[Balint Reczey]

Hi Daniel,

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 2:11 PM, Daniel Axtens
<daniel.axtens at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I looked into compression algorithms a bit in a previous role, and to be
> honest I'm quite surprised to see zstd proposed for package storage. zstd,
> according to its own github repo, is "targeting real-time compression
> scenarios". It's not really designed to be run at its maximum compression
> level, it's designed to really quickly compress data coming off the wire -
> things like compressing log files being streamed to a central server, or I
> guess writing random data to btrfs where speed is absolutely an issue.
>
> Is speed of decompression a big user concern relative to file size? I admit
> that I am biased - as an Australian and with the crummy internet that my
> location entails, I'd save much more time if the file was 6% smaller and
> took 10% longer to decompress than the other way around.

Yes, decompression speed is a big issue in some cases. Please consider
the case of provisioning cluoud/container instances, where after
booting the image plenty of packages need to be installed and saving
seconds matter a lot.

Zstd format also allows parallel decompression which can make package
installation even quicker in wall-clock time.

Internet connection speed increases by ~50% (according to this [3]
study which matches my experience)  on average per year which is more
than 6% for every two months.

>
> Did you consider Google's Brotli?

We did consider it but it was less promising.

Cheers,
Balint

[3] http://xahlee.info/comp/bandwidth.html

>
> Regards,
> Daniel
>
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 9:58 PM, Julian Andres Klode
> <julian.klode at canonical.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 11:06:11AM +0100, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
>> > Hey folks,
>> >
>> > We had a coding day in Foundations last week and Balint and Julian added
>> > support for zstd compression to dpkg [1] and apt [2].
>> >
>> > [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892664
>> > [2] https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/merge_requests/8
>> >
>> > Zstd is a compression algorithm developed by Facebook that offers far
>> > higher decompression speeds than xz or even gzip (at roughly constant
>> > speed and memory usage across all levels), while offering 19 compression
>> > levels ranging from roughly comparable to gzip in size (but much faster)
>> > to 19, which is roughly comparable to xz -6:
>> >
>> > In our configuration, we run zstd at level 19. For bionic main amd64,
>> > this causes a size increase of about 6%, from roughly 5.6 to 5.9 GB.
>> > Installs speed up by about 10%, or, if eatmydata is involved, by up to
>> > 40% - user time generally by about 50%.
>> >
>> > Our implementations for apt and dpkg support multiple frames as used by
>> > pzstd, so packages can be compressed and decompressed in parallel
>> > eventually.
>>
>> More links:
>>
>> PPA:
>> https://launchpad.net/~canonical-foundations/+archive/ubuntu/zstd-archive
>> APT merge request: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/merge_requests/8
>> dpkg patches:      https://bugs.debian.org/892664
>>
>> I'd also like to talk a bit more about libzstd itself: The package is
>> currently in universe, but btrfs recently gained support for zstd,
>> so we already have a copy in the kernel and we need to MIR it anyway
>> for btrfs-progs.
>>
>> --
>> debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
>> ubuntu core developer                              i speak de, en
>>
>> --


-- 
Balint Reczey
Ubuntu & Debian Developer