>(zcat is limited in I/O and was run concurrently with bzcat on a 2 CPU >2.2MHz Opteron system) >time zcat .... > /dev/null >77.91u 3.97s 1:58.24 69.2% > > >time bzcat ... > /dev/null >723.85u 7.13s 12:59.07 93.8% > >We're talking nearly a factor 10 of CPU time on a relatively fast system.
On SPARC the problem is, of course, a lot more pronounced: 150.47u 17.23s 5:35.82 49.9% 1245.77u 26.48s 28:21.72 74.7% 3 minutes of CPU time vs 21 (1600Mhz Ultra-45). In this particular instance, one can easily observe that gzcat does near wire speeds from an NFS server whereas bunzip2 peaks at a 20Mb/s. For my own benefit, I'm thinking of writing a tool to convert install images from .bz2 to .gz so SPARC installs are speeded up, especially on slower systems. I don't think a 10% performance increase of bzip2 will be of anyhelp; we're looking for a factor 7. (Admittedly, this is much less an issue on current Intel/AMD CPUs) Casper
