While using 7-zip the other day, I did an informal comparison of every compression format 7-zip supports. While the 7-zip format compresses the best, it also takes the longest to compress. What really surprised me was that bzip compression was by far the fastest, and 7-zip only had slightly better compression than it. Bzip also has much better compression than normal zip, and it compressed much faster than zip. I'm wondering how much of the slowness of the algorithms is incidental, due to 7-zip's implementation, and how much of it is fundamental to the algorithms. As for decompression, zip was by far the fastest, with 7-zip coming in a few seconds behind, and bzip taking roughly twice as long as 7-zip.
However, my comparison might be a bad one, since I was only compressing one 30 meg tar file. For multiple files, or different types of data, its possible the algorithms would show different behavior, though it doesn't seem like that should make that much of a difference.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
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