3 ms·
A part of this was that zstd and Brotli were able to use compression history windows of MBs not KBs, while DEFLATE maxes out at 32KB. RAM was thousands of times
by twotwotwo 3y ago
A part of this was that zstd and Brotli were able to use compression history windows of MBs not KBs, while DEFLATE maxes out at 32KB. RAM was thousands of times more expensive in the early 90s, so a smaller history window made sense.
There are also optimizations that only work on today's larger cores, and you have to actively update old code to get the advantages (happily some work is going into that): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32533061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32533061 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32537545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32537545
That's not to minimize the clever ideas and amazing implementation work in new stuff. It's more that people were making smart decisions both then and now, more so than you might guess just from comparisons on today's hardware.