Re: In response to kernel compression e-mail a few months ago.

[Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>]

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007, Al Viro wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 09:46:15PM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>> (Obviously we shall pick .7z)
>
> The hell it is.  Take a look at memory footprint of those suckers...
>

For compression with -mx=9 it does use 500-900 MiB of RAM, that is true.
For decompression, 50-70 MiB.

Each have their pros/cons but nothing can compress the kernel any further 
than 7z, supports stdin/stdout and also has a native windows port.  I used 
to strictly use bzip2 for backups and such but if I can pick off an 
additional 20-30% more than bzip2 for my backups which I will not use often,
7zip seems to be the winner for space savings and possibly for 
bandwidth/cost savings..

compress:
   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
10544 war       20   0  700m 681m 1632 S  141 20.7   1:41.46 7z

decompress:
   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
11927 war       20   0 71256  66m 1536 R   88  2.0   0:04.07 7z

Justin.