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Compression Tools Compared

Issue 137

From Issue #137
September 2005

Jul 28, 2005  By Kingsley G. Mor...
 in
Use top-performing but little-known lossless data compression tools to increase your storage and bandwidth by up to 400%.

The -1c tells lzop to use compression level 1 and to write to standard output. -d tells it to decompress. Even with this minimal compression, you still might increase your hardware's effective bandwidth by 75%.

For network connections and CPUs falling in the graph's black region, don't compress at all. Simply send it.

C Libraries

If you want even more performance, you may want to try calling a C compression library from your own program.

Table 1. C Libraries

ToolLibrary
lzopliblzo1
gzip, zipzlib1g, zlibc, zlib, zziplib
bzip2libbzip2
7za, lzmalzma

Resources for this article: /article/8403.

Kingsley G. Morse Jr. has been using computers for 29 years, and Debian GNU/Linux has been on his desktop for nine. He worked at Hewlett-Packard and advocates for men's reproductive rights. He can be reached at change@nas.com.

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How to improve backups?

Paolo Subiaco's picture
Submitted by Paolo Subiaco (not verified) on Sat, 06/26/2010 - 05:00.

Hi. Congratulations for this very useful article... I use a script for backup made by myself which use tar +gzip... switching to tar - lsop backup time takes less than half time, increasing the backup size by about 25%.
An idea to improve speed is to replace tar with a more intelligent tool.
Infact, tar simply "cat all files to stdout" and then gzip or lsop compress this huge stream of data, but some data is already compressed (images, movies, open document files) and don't need to be recompressed!
The idea is to have an archiver (like tar) which compress each file by itself, storing the original file in case of images, movies, archives, already compressed files.
Is there any tool that can do this, and save all priviledges (owner, group, mode) associated to each file like tar does?
Thank you. Paolo

(1) Found a typo: "On the

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 02/20/2008 - 04:05.

(1) Found a typo:
"On the other hand, if you have a 1GHz network, but only a 100MHz CPU"

1 GHz network? Should maybe be 1 Gbps.

(2) Suggestion:
Multi-Core CPUs are the big thing today, compression tools that could utilise multiple cores can run 2, 4 or soon even 8 times faster on "normal" desktop PCs...not even speaking of the servers...which compression tools can utilise this CPU power?

multi-core CPU support

zmi's picture
Submitted by zmi (not verified) on Thu, 09/25/2008 - 00:43.

Multi-Core CPUs are the big thing today, compression tools that could utilise multiple cores can run 2, 4 or soon even 8 times faster on "normal" desktop PCs...not even speaking of the servers...which compression tools can utilise this CPU power?

http://compression.ca/pbzip2/
There's parallel bzip2, very good but not pipe support.

HTH,
mfg zmi

Very nice information

Bharat's picture
Submitted by Bharat (not verified) on Thu, 06/21/2007 - 05:41.

Very nice information provided.Thanks!!!

Excelent article.

Eduardo Diaz's picture
Submitted by Eduardo Diaz (not verified) on Tue, 11/14/2006 - 10:20.

Thanks very much for this article. I really enjoyed it, and will be helpfull for my daily work.

1. how about another part

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 11/28/2005 - 12:00.

how about another part with specific data - like 90+% text? for mysql dumps & dbmail scenarios etc.

and 45MB does not sound as sufficient test data size for rzip to test it's speed.

Compression on Windows

Werner Bergmans's picture
Submitted by Werner Bergmans (not verified) on Thu, 02/02/2006 - 16:27.

First of all excellent test!.

Believe it or not, but compression is one of those application types where all research takes place on Windows Pc's. The last couple of years there were some major breakthroughs in compression caused by the new PAQ context modeling algorithms. Have a look at this site for some results. Programs like gzip, rzip 7-zip and lzop are tested here too, so it should be easy to compare results.
http://www.maximumcompression.com/

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