On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 15:22:45 GMT, toad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Hi. Reiserfs packs small files well, and has problems with large tails. > So would it make sense to try to gzip tails before packing?
AIX already supports this sort of compression. Interestingly enough, they use LZ compression instead, probably for the following reasons: 1) Consider any patent issues - I think LZW has a problem here. gzip I believe is free, but... 2) Remember that you're only compressing a *tail* - as such, you want something that does a reasonable job for "very short" runs. 'gzip < /dev/null | wc' says 20 characters of overhead - do LZ or other schemes do better? Also, think about the startup CPU cost for each tail on compression/decompression - is gzip optimal or are other things better? Remember - this has different trade-offs than the usual usage of gzip. Usually, you don't bother gzipping unless the file is large, and you don't do it often, so you can afford to be slower to get better compression. For tails, you probably want an algorithm that's 15% faster, even if the result is 15% longer... /Valdis
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