On Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:45:38 -0400
gene heskett <[email protected]> wrote:

> That could be handy if it is easily configured to be used, which I
> have not investigated.

http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/How_To:Use_pigz_to_speed_up_compression

> Making amanda use its parallelism might be a
> challenging project however.

Other emails on this list indicate that using pigz does speed up amanda
runs.

Just for the halibut, I did a bit of testing on an otherwise idle
desktop with two AMD cores. I created a tarball using my /var
directory. Then:

root@dzur:/# time pigz var.test.tar 

real    6m1.411s
user    9m5.290s
sys     0m44.550s
root@dzur:/# ll var.test.tar.gz 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6786436232 2011-08-25 10:07 var.test.tar.gz
root@dzur:/# time gzip -d var.test.tar.gz 

real    4m16.611s
user    1m43.080s
sys     0m38.410s
root@dzur:/# ll var.test.tar 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9458923520 2011-08-25 10:07 var.test.tar
root@dzur:/# tar -tf var.test.tar
# output omitted; no error messages
root@dzur:/# time gzip var.test.tar 

real    9m45.992s
user    8m23.070s
sys     0m32.970s
root@dzur:/# ll var.test.tar.gz 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6785153296 2011-08-25 10:07 var.test.tar.gz
root@dzur:/# gunzip var.test.tar.gz 
root@dzur:/# ll var.test.tar 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9458923520 2011-08-25 10:07 var.test.tar
root@dzur:/# pigz --version
pigz 2.1.6
root@dzur:/#


Note that gzip took noticeably longer but produced a marginally smaller
output file (possibly due to different default compression values; I
did not investigate). Testing the output file as above produced no error
message. The uncompressed tarball retained its size.

I used gzip -d to test rather than pigz -d in order to verify
compatibility.

While we're at it, I am glad I never did implement bzip2 compression
for Amanada:

root@dzur:/# time bzip2 var.test.tar 

real    157m54.710s
user    156m41.360s
sys     0m35.550s
root@dzur:/# ll var.test.tar.bz2 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6780647698 2011-08-25 10:07 var.test.tar.bz2
root@dzur:/# 


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