On Thursday, August 25, 2011 09:17:04 AM Brian Cuttler did opine: > As long as we are talking about HW vs SW compression, I should > say that we've installed pigz, a parallelized version of gzip, > on some of our systems with good result. If you have a system > that will support it and SW compression is running long you might > want to test it out. That could be handy if it is easily configured to be used, which I have not investigated. Making amanda use its parallelism might be a challenging project however.
Another compressor also comes to mind where much of the data being compressed is in a common format. I have a 220 megabyte file here which contains the src trees of every linux kernel released from 1.0 to about 2.6.37, which was done by and can be unpacked if the disk space is available, by "lrzip", the lr meaning long range as it finds and removes the redundancies in a tree of data like that archive has. I would suspect that speed is not one of its strong points, but you have to be impressed by that compression ratio, as that is probably more than 15Gb of data unpacked. This was done by (IIRC) Con Kovilas who also maintains the bfs (brain fuck scheduler) patches for the linux kernel, and which I have been running here for several months. It brings a whole new feel to the users desktop experience, unless I see the cpu usages all fired up when amanda is running in the gkrellm panel, I am not aware that amanda has fired up, which usually results in me being virtually locked out of the system by amanda's running, instead remaining quite usable in spite of a session of gzip -best showing 98% cpu on one or another of the 4 cores. The difference between the usual cfs scheduler and the bfs version is quite impressive to me. No, I am not building these kernels, I get them from the PCLos 2011 repo, which is what I am running on this machine. Cheers, gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://204.111.67.138:85/gene> Maryann's Law: You can always find what you're not looking for.
