This is my old site that I'm keeping up for historical purposes and is no longer updated. You probably want to see my new site.

June 9, 2004

rzip

Linux at 07:13:08 PM MT (link) | rzip is awesome. Basically, it's another compression program in the family of gzip and bzip2, except that the compression is absolutely excellent.

I haven't prepared any quantifiable numbers yet, but rzip is almost 3x faster than bzip2, and gets completely superior compression compared to gzip and bzip2. Compare:

545M files.tar
274M files.tar.bz2
287M files.tar.gz
85M files.tar.rz

These files aren't a good representation of files that are usually compressed, and obviously they compress REALLY well. I think I'm going to create another test that uses some better data with fewer repeats that is also larger--my billion digits of pi I have lying around looks like a good candidate.