Re: Reiser4 und LZO compression

["Ray Lee" <madrabbit@gmail.com>]

On 8/29/06, Nigel Cunningham <ncunningham@linuxmail.org> wrote:
> Hi.
> On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 03:23 -0500, David Masover wrote:
> > Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > > We used gzip when we first implemented compression support, and found it
> > > to be far too slow. Even with the fastest compression options, we were
> > > only getting a few megabytes per second. Perhaps I did something wrong
> > > in configuring it, but there's not that many things to get wrong!
> >
> > All that comes to mind is the speed/quality setting -- the number from 1
> > to 9.  Recently, I backed up someone's hard drive using -1, and I
> > believe I was still able to saturate... the _network_.  Definitely try
> > again if you haven't changed this, but I can't imagine I'm the first
> > persson to think of it.
> >
> >  From what I remember, gzip -1 wasn't faster than the disk.  But at
> > least for (very) repetitive data, I was wrong:
> >
> > eve:~ sanity$ time bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=10m count=10; sync'
> > 10+0 records in
> > 10+0 records out
> > 104857600 bytes transferred in 3.261990 secs (32145287 bytes/sec)
> >
> > real    0m3.746s
> > user    0m0.005s
> > sys     0m0.627s
> > eve:~ sanity$ time bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero bs=10m count=10 | gzip -v1 >
> > test; sync'
> > 10+0 records in
> > 10+0 records out
> > 104857600 bytes transferred in 2.404093 secs (43616282 bytes/sec)
> >   99.5%
> >
> > real    0m2.558s
> > user    0m1.554s
> > sys     0m0.680s
> > eve:~ sanity$
> >
> >
> >
> > This was on OS X, but I think it's still valid -- this is a slightly
> > older Powerbook, with a 5400 RPM drive, 1.6 ghz G4.
> >
> > -1 is still worlds better than nothing.  The backup was over 15 gigs,
> > down to about 6 -- loads of repetitive data, I'm sure, but that's where
> > you win with compression anyway.
>
> Wow. That's a lot better; I guess I did get something wrong in trying to
> tune deflate. That was pre-cryptoapi though; looking at
> cryptoapi/deflate.c, I don't see any way of controlling the compression
> level. Am I missing anything?

Compressing /dev/zero isn't a great test. The timings are really data-dependant:

ray@phoenix:~$ time bash -c 'sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=8M count=64 |
gzip -v1 >/dev/null'
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 7.60817 seconds, 70.6 MB/s
99.6%

real    0m7.652s
user    0m6.581s
sys     0m0.701s
ray@phoenix:~$ time bash -c 'sudo dd if=/dev/mem bs=8M count=64 | gzip
-v1 >/dev/null'
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 21.5863 seconds, 24.9 MB/s
70.4%

real    0m21.626s
user    0m18.763s
sys     0m1.762s

This is on an AMD64 laptop.

Ray
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