On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 11:13:59PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 06:14:36PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote: > > On Tue, May 07, 2013 at 09:49:03PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote: > > > As mentioned some months ago [0], I'm planning to switch dpkg-deb default > > > compressor from gzip to xz, as there seemed to be consensus that was > > > the way to go, and given the amount of already manually switched > > > packages, or packaging helpers. :/ > > > > What about the compression level? xz -6 is pretty heavy and not needed > > for 99% of the packages. -3 or even -2 or -1 are sufficient.
> As my and Hideki's repacks of the archive show, special-casing small > packages is a waste of time: gains are hardly below linear for any > packages big enough to take longer than fork()ing the compressor. dpkg-deb does not fork the xz: | $ objdump -x /usr/bin/dpkg-deb | grep liblzma | NEEDED liblzma.so.5 > Quoting some data from 2011, all with xz -6: > ] * A repack of the whole archive (amd64+all main, ~40GB) took close to three > ] hours on a 6xPhenomII 2.8GHz box (ar p|gzip/bzip2 -d|xz). This doesn't add up to the numbers I have from real life packages. linux-image-*-amd64-dbg, compressed size 250MiB, takes 20-30 minutes to compress on an 61xx Opteron. > I'd thus suggest using the default, -6, everywhere other than perhaps > openclipart (already compressed) and the likes. xz folks chose this value > for a reason :) What is the advantage of -6 over -1? How much better is it? How much less time does it need? How much memory does it need? Bastian -- I'm a soldier, not a diplomat. I can only tell the truth. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy", stardate 3198.9 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130508224224.gb19...@waldi.eu.org