Re: Bzip2 vs Gzip & some thoughts.

Julian Seward (Julian_Seward@muraroa.demon.co.uk)
Mon, 15 Dec 1997 20:56:47 +0000


> 1.344879 = 134.4879 % better compression. ( Nice :-)
> But takes 2.356539 times longer to achieve this. (:-})
> And takes 3.888475 times longer to UnCompress than gzip. (:-})

Hmm, what's that old saying about a free lunch :-?

Decompression speed is a problem. In due course, a version with
approximately 40% faster decompression will be available. I have
done significant work on it since bzip2 was released. Compression
speed improvements are harder to obtain.

For many people, including me, the performance loss is an acceptable
price to pay for shorter download times, etc.

J