On Sep 23, 2020, at 04:29, Dan Ports wrote:
> Also, bz2 is particularly slow at decompression, so even xz is likely
> an improvement there.
As far as compression/decompression time goes, the normal gzip, bzip2 and xz
tools are single-threaded, as far as I know, so there is an opportunity to go
faster by using parallel processing.
For bzip2, you can install lbzip2 and configure MacPorts to use it; it then
compresses and decompresses in parallel, even bz2 files that were not created
with lbzip2. I have been using this on my Mac for years.
For xz, there's pixz. It sounds like xz files cannot be decompressed in
parallel unless they were created with pixz. We could install pixz on the
buildbot servers and use it to create the archives. This would improve
compress/decompress performance on the buildbot servers, and users could choose
to install pixz to get improved decompression performance or we can consider
bundling it with MacPorts base in the future; it is BSD licensed.
