Dan McGee (2009-01-12 19:59):
Some non-benefits of LZMA for those that brought up compression of packages : $ ./testzip.sh openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-x86_64.pkg.tar
<...snip...>
Yes, LZMA took nearly 5 minutes to compress this package which gzip accomplished in 22 seconds.
I am replying to a thread in arch-dev-public list, since I haven't got permission to post there. I would like to propose my simple test (note the compression ratio switches): compression: gzip -9 openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar 48,20s user 0,30s system 99% cpu 48,609 total lzma -1 openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar 50,16s user 0,42s system 99% cpu 50,969 total bzip2 -1 openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar 58,37s user 0,34s system 99% cpu 58,986 total lzma -2 openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar 72,19s user 0,36s system 99% cpu 1:12,60 total decompression: gzip -d openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar.gz 3,33s user 0,39s system 98% cpu 3,783 total lzma -d openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar.lzma 14,39s user 0,36s system 99% cpu 14,839 total bzip2 -d openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar.bz2 18,61s user 0,44s system 98% cpu 19,260 total sizes: 303M openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar 141M openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar.gz 139M openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar.bz2 129M openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar.lzma 119M openoffice-base-3.0.0-4-i686.pkg.tar.lzma-2 default compression ratio switches: gzip -6 bzip2 -9 lzma -7 And an excerpt from lzma manual: In this manual lzma is compared mostly to bzip2 because that is currently one of the most widely used free software to compress tar files made for distribution. Comparing lzma to gzip is not practical because neither lzma nor bzip2 can compete with gzip in compression speed. On the other hand the compression ratio of gzip is worse than of lzma and bzip2. -- Rogutes