Hi.
On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 03:23 -0500, David Masover wrote:
> Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > We used gzip when we first implemented compression support, and found it
> > to be far too slow. Even with the fastest compression options, we were
> > only getting a few megabytes per second. Perhaps I did something wrong
> > in configuring it, but there's not that many things to get wrong!
>
> All that comes to mind is the speed/quality setting -- the number from 1
> to 9. Recently, I backed up someone's hard drive using -1, and I
> believe I was still able to saturate... the _network_. Definitely try
> again if you haven't changed this, but I can't imagine I'm the first
> persson to think of it.
>
> From what I remember, gzip -1 wasn't faster than the disk. But at
> least for (very) repetitive data, I was wrong:
>
> eve:~ sanity$ time bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=10m count=10; sync'
> 10+0 records in
> 10+0 records out
> 104857600 bytes transferred in 3.261990 secs (32145287 bytes/sec)
>
> real 0m3.746s
> user 0m0.005s
> sys 0m0.627s
> eve:~ sanity$ time bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero bs=10m count=10 | gzip -v1 >
> test; sync'
> 10+0 records in
> 10+0 records out
> 104857600 bytes transferred in 2.404093 secs (43616282 bytes/sec)
> 99.5%
>
> real 0m2.558s
> user 0m1.554s
> sys 0m0.680s
> eve:~ sanity$
>
>
>
> This was on OS X, but I think it's still valid -- this is a slightly
> older Powerbook, with a 5400 RPM drive, 1.6 ghz G4.
>
> -1 is still worlds better than nothing. The backup was over 15 gigs,
> down to about 6 -- loads of repetitive data, I'm sure, but that's where
> you win with compression anyway.
Wow. That's a lot better; I guess I did get something wrong in trying to
tune deflate. That was pre-cryptoapi though; looking at
cryptoapi/deflate.c, I don't see any way of controlling the compression
level. Am I missing anything?