I decided to do another test suite, this time including decompression. The data is a concatenation of two tar archives. The first tar contains 3+ GB of C:\Program Files from a Windows XP installation. The second tar is a 3+ GB Ubuntu installation, sans /usr which is on a separate partition. In total this amounts to 6.53 GB.
The test host is my girfriend's 3 GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and 2MB L2 cache. It is rated at ~ 6000 bogomips. The computer is running Ubuntu 8.04 with a custom 2.6.25.4 kernel. All files were on an fuse mounted ntfs partition.
In addition to processing time I tried to measure RAM usage with GNU time but I didn't get any meaningful results. I did manage to record page faults,and I may add those statistics later.
This time lha is out. It doesn't seem to like files this big. Since I was also going to benchmark decompression I decided to include lzo, which is allegedly very fast at decompression.
Complete list of the contestants:
- bzip2 1.0.4 (-9k)
- gzip 1.3.12 (-9c)
- lrzip 0.23 (-w 9 -q)
- LZMA SDK 4.43 (-9kq)
- LZO library 1.08 (-9 -k)
- RAR 3.71 (-m5)
Below are the results broken down into compressed size and ratio, compression time and decompression time.
Compressed size, from worst to best:
- uncompressed: 7,011,041,280 (6.53 GB), ratio 1.000
- lzo_________: 4,719,645,902 (4.40 GB), ratio 1.486
- gzip________: 4,563,292,811 (4.25 GB), ratio 1.536
- bzip2_______: 4,428,910,323 (4.12 GB), ratio 1.583
- rar_________: 4,125,923,141 (3.84 GB), ratio 1,699
- lzma________: 3,840,213,621 (3.58 GB), ratio 1,826
- lrzip_______: 3,585,069,056 (3.34 GB), ratio 1.955
Wall clock compression time, from slowest to fastest:
- lzma_: 8,409 s
- lrzip: 7,904 s
- rar__: 5,906 s
- lzo__: 3,487 s
- bzip2: 3,034 s
- gzip_: 1,598 s
- cat__: __111 s (for reference)
- lrzip: 2,830 s
- bzip2: 1,491 s
- lzma_: __981 s
- rar__: __604 s
- gzip_: __503 s
- lzo__: __449 s
- cat__: __111 s (for reference)
The shell script used to gather these statistics is here.
