10:00am, Thursday 16 February 2006
I just found out about rzip and 7zip, new-ish file compression utilities. Being obsessive about performance and statistics and stuff, I ran a few tests: all these required the compressor to produce its "best" (most compressed) output.
compressor | size of compressed file (%) | CPU time (s) |
---|---|---|
gzip | 48.9 | 1.38 |
bzip2 | 46.1 | 12.4 |
rzip | 45.2 | 17.2 |
7zip | 43.1 | 28.2 |
So gzip is far, far away the fastest (which explains its continued widespread use) but using one of the others could save significant amounts of space with very large files - if you have the time to spare.