On 3/16/19 1:30 AM, Adam Fontenot via arch-general wrote:
On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 11:10 PM Darren Wu via arch-general <arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote:
I have 4Mbps (512KBytes/s) 'broad'band and i7-6500U CPU. I wanna cry.
Even in a worst-case scenario like this one, the Squash compression test I linked to shows an increase from 26 secs (xz -6) to 29 secs (zstd -19), so you wouldn't be significantly impacted by this change.
I hope your local authorities decide to give you real broadband in the near future, however. :-)
My situation is similar to Darren's: My primary connection to the internet is through my cell phone carrier and a mobile WiFi hot spot. In urban areas, I can get as much as 50 megabits per second, but presently, due to my remote location, it's around 5 or 6. I also have a monthly data cap, which I share with my wife, and only WiFi (i.e., no wires; that nice 300 megabits from hot spot to device is shared by all devices, and there's a per device limit, too). FWIW, I have an i7-7700HQ CPU. In the old days (when large files were a megabyte or two and network bandwidth was measured in kilibits per second), we assumed that the network was the bottleneck. I think what Adam is propsing is that things are different now, and that the CPU is the bottleneck. As always, it depends. :-) My vote, whether it has any weight or not, is for higher compression ratios at the expense of CPU cycles when decompressing; i.e., xz rather than zstd. Also, consider that the 10% increase in archive size is suffered repeatedly as servers store and propagate new releases, but that the increase in decompression time is only suffered by the end user once, likely during a manual update operation or an automated background process, where it doesn't matter much. I used to have this argument with coworkers over build times and wake-from-sleep times. Is the extra time to decompress archives really killing anyone's productivity? Are users choosing OS distros based on how long it takes do install Open Office? Are Darren and I dinosaurs, doomed to live in a world where everyone else has a multi-gigabit per second internet connection and a cell phone class CPU? Jokingly, but not as much as you think, Dan