I have two ftp.$LANG_CODE.debian.org unstable mirrors in my /etc/apt/sources.list, because sometimes one of them might be down or out-of-date.
Doing an "apt-file search aoeui" on my fast (modern 8-core Sandy
Bridge) computer takes around 4 seconds. Almost all of this time is
spent gunzipping the file lists.
I believe merely using lzop could give a 2-4x speedup:
------------------------------------------------------------
$ time gzip -d <ftp.fi.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_Contents-amd64.gz
>/dev/null
real 0m1.608s
user 0m1.584s
sys 0m0.016s
$ time lzop -d <ftp.fi.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_Contents-amd64.lzo
>/dev/null
real 0m0.382s
user 0m0.356s
sys 0m0.024s
------------------------------------------------------------
IOW gzip -d takes 4.4 times longer than lzop -d. The price for this is
an 1.7x increase in the size of the compressed file:
-rw-r--r-- 1 sliedes sliedes 19892895 Jul 2 14:21
ftp.fi.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_Contents-amd64.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 sliedes sliedes 34062072 Jul 2 14:23
ftp.fi.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_Contents-amd64.lzo
Decompressing a gzip -1 compressed file still takes 3.3x the time of
lzop -d:
------------------------------------------------------------
$ time gunzip -d
<gzip-1/ftp.fi.debian.org_debian_dists_unstable_Contents-amd64.gz >/dev/null
real 0m1.199s
user 0m1.164s
sys 0m0.012s
------------------------------------------------------------
Sami
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