Re: [kernel.org users] XZ Migration discussion

[Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org>]

On Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:28:39 +0100, Stefan Richter wrote:
> Jean Delvare wrote:
> > So the gz option is unsurprisingly faster, setting up the source tree
> > takes almost 3 minutes less (-21%).
> 
> If the download link had been slower than about 75 kB/s, the bz2 option
> would have been faster even on this old machine.
> 
> With xz, download would be faster than bz2 and decompression would be
> somewhere between bz2 and gz --- at least on machines without notable
> memory constraints.  xz's decompressor is more memory hungry than
> bzip2's one as far as I understand their manual pages.  But at the
> default xz compressor setting of -6, the decompressor will still use
> just 10 MB and should therefore not cause even your 64 MB machine to
> swap all the time during decompression.

Note that, if memory consumption is really a concern on either end, we
could use xz -5, which still achieves much better compression than bz2
but doesn't require more memory for decompression.

-- 
Jean Delvare