4 ms·
I've found that on many types of data, xz -2 is twice as fast and compresses better than gzip -9. Of course gzip -1 kicks the pants off xz but there's absolutel
by gxti 16y ago
I've found that on many types of data, xz -2 is twice as fast and compresses better than gzip -9. Of course gzip -1 kicks the pants off xz but there's absolutely no reason to use gzip at its higher levels, nor to use bzip2 at all. And if you want fast, LZO does it better -- the lzop tool provides a typical unix compress interface.
Using 50MiB from a tarball I had lying around, best of 3:
prog time(s) size(%)
gzip -1 1.703 38.7
gzip -9 14.670 35.1 (worse than xz -1)
bzip2 -1 7.714 34.0
bzip2 -9 8.035 31.4 (worse than xz -1)
xz -1 6.278 31.3
xz -9 42.445 22.7 (best compression)
lzop -1 0.670 46.1 (fastest)
lzop -9 18.144 38.0
- huhtenberg 16y agoOut of curiousity, can you run this tarball through paq (say, paq8hp12)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ
- gxti 16y agoIt segfaulted at the end, after taking 7m28s. I don't know how big the result was because it got truncated to 35 bytes.
- huhtenberg 16y agoUgh. Can you try with a lighter compression level? There is a command line switch for that, and it should also show the memory requirements for each compression level. I'm insisting because PAQ is a really incredible collection of compressors. Far more intelligence in it than in the LZ* bunch.
- gxti 16y agoIf anyone is still reading this thread, I made a chart overnight using a better corpus: http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/misc/2010/06/25-shootout.png http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/misc/2010/06/25-shootout.p... http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/misc/2010/06/25-linux-2.6.34.ods http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/misc/2010/06/25-linux-2.6....