blech:
posted on 2003/08/28 12:50
Summary: bzip2 produces somewhat better compression at a very high cost in processor time.
Apparently this is expected, but nonetheless there seems to be a move to bzip2 that doesn't seem justified.
jerakeen:
Processor time is cheap. Bandwidth isn't. Sure, live table compression is not a good use of bzip2, so fair enough.
blech:
Um, no, actually, for me, I'd rather have a 10% bigger file than a 1000% slower decompression.
jerakeen:
I should point out that gzip compression of HTTP requests is getting popular amongst the blogging/rss crowd, which implies it's been around about 10 years...
blech:
Hmm, why isn't that bzip2 compression? Perhaps because the servers would fall to their knees with the computation required?
jerakeen:
Context, man, context! When I downlload the linux kernel, I prefer a bzip2 version, because its a couple of megs smaller! When I'm getting a web page, the difference between bzip2 and gzip is trivial as compared to the difference between both of them and an uncomplressed page!
blech:
Even for the Linux kernel, I'm unimpressed. How long does two megs take me to download? A couple of minutes, even at home? The uncompression cost is more than the saved download time, even on ADSL.
Now, for modems, yes, you might have a point. But we despise modem users. Move to somewhere with bandwidth.
jerakeen:
If I'm compiling a kernel, I don't care about the cpu cycles I'm throwing at decompression. But fair enough. The world as a whole does seem to agree with you, you know, compare umbers of .gz and .bz2 files out there.
-trackback-
Quarter Life Crisis / zzzip: John Gruber follows up on his recent article on plumbing. More good points in there. A nice take at Apple's iTunes site, via 2lmc. Also a discussion on bzip2...
[ 0 days, 11 hours later ]
Damn, good point.
bzip2 is geekier.
We hate you all. Yes, especially you. Sod off and DIE