Nigel Cunningham wrote:
Hi.
On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 06:05 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
Hmm. LZO is the best compression algorithm for the task as measured by
the objectives of good compression effectiveness while still having very
low CPU usage (the best of those written and GPL'd, there is a slightly
better one which is proprietary and uses more CPU, LZRW if I remember
right. The gzip code base uses too much CPU, though I think Edward made
I don't think that LZO beats LZF in both speed and compression ratio.
LZF is also available under GPL (dual-licensed BSD) and was choosen in favor
of LZO for the next generation suspend-to-disk code of the Linux kernel.
see: http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/liblzf.html
thanks for the info, we will compare them
For Suspend2, we ended up converting the LZF support to a cryptoapi
plugin. Is there any chance that you could use cryptoapi modules? We
could then have a hope of sharing the support.
I am throwing in gzip: would it be meaningful to use that instead? The
decoder (inflate.c) is already there.
06:04 shanghai:~/liblzf-1.6 > l configure*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jengelh users 154894 Mar 3 2005 configure
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jengelh users 26810 Mar 3 2005 configure.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 jengelh users 30611 Aug 28 20:32 configure.gz-z9
-rw-r--r-- 1 jengelh users 30693 Aug 28 20:32 configure.gz-z6
-rw-r--r-- 1 jengelh users 53077 Aug 28 20:32 configure.lzf
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.
Well, you use cryptoapi anyway, so it should be easy to just let the
user pick a plugin, right?