On Saturday March 29 2008 11:54:07 am Adrian Fisher wrote: > Hello again all :) > > What is the best open source (or at least non commercial) compression > format known? How does it fair with source code? > > Regards, > > A.
7zip/lzma compresses better than anything else, but also costs the most cpu.
If saving space is your primary concern, then this is the best choice. The
decompression time for lzma is very competitive. Here are some examples:
261M linux-2.6.24.3.tar
45M linux-2.6.24.3.tar.bz2
1m32.503s compression time at -9
0m29.657s decompression time
57M linux-2.6.24.3.tar.gz
0m49.603s compression time at -9
0m7.515s decompression time
37M linux-2.6.24.3.tar.lzma
11m1.600s compression time at -9
0m10.397s decompression time
Note that your results may be different, depending on assembly code used when
building lzma, and the type of file you're compressing. Lzma is ideal for the
world we currently live in... it is much better for the file's maker to spend
ten times longer compressing a file if it saves download time and storage
space. If, however, you're compressing whole partitions (or compressing,
decompressing, reading/editing, and recompressing, repeatedly) it will
probably be too expensive on the cpu, and gzip/zlib may be a better choice.
robert
pgpi8H8qKeNlP.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
