compression tools

[Steven W. Orr]

On Wednesday, Jun 22nd 2005 at 19:42 +0200, quoth Gérard Milmeister:

=>On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 13:25 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:
=>> On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 12:54, sharif islam wrote:
=>> > Is there any compression mechanism that's rated for tar files as big
=>> > as, say, 100GB?
=>> 
=>> I don't believe anyone rates compression programs based the size of the
=>> file to be compressed.
=>
=>For files of that size, it is probably useful for compress program to be
=>fast. Bzip2 for example would take ages to compress 100GB. Gzip with a
=>low compress degree (< 5) would be more useful.

I think you'll find that gzip and bzip2 will give very similiar results 
both in time and space by appropriately lowering the compression factor.

e.g., bzip2 -1 and gzip -1 will be very comparable. 

The point is that the larger the chunk that any compression program has to 
operate upon the more compression you're going to end up with and the 
greater the time requirement will be for the chunk.

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