From: liljeber@hydra.Helsinki.FI (Mika Liljeberg) Subject: Re: SLS, why don't you use gzip for compression ? Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 19:15:45 GMT
In article <1993Jan14.064429.5047@sol.UVic.CA> pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) wrote:
> 1) compress is about 13k while gzip is about 95K: gzip will
> not fit onto the ram disk. Fine, I could make it the first
> package, use compress to bring it out, and go from there.
nestor:~# dir `which gzip`
-rwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 37888 Dec 28 23:59 /usr/bin/gzip*
See? Gzip only takes about 38k, even though it's been compiled with
-m486 and linked clean. Or do you want to make it static?
> 4) gzip appears to be a lot slower, so it will be much less
> convenient, especially for me.
I find that gzip (normal compression) is marginally slower than
compress, but not excessively so. At maximum compression gzip gets
noticeably slower, but only gains 1-2% in size, so I rarely use it so.
Make sure you compile gzip with the 386 specific assembly code. This
has a considerable effect on speed. In addition, gzip -d is much
faster than compress -d (by a factor of 2 or so), even on plain old
compressed files. I feel that this more than offsets the slower
compression.
Yes, I have modified my tar to use gzip. :-)
Mika