On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Jan de Groot <jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 18:47 +0300, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: >> Hi, >> >> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 10:14 +0200, Jan de Groot wrote: >> > Pacman itself is ready for .tar.bz2 package files. The whole issue >> > with .bz2 files is that compression and decompression times increase a >> > lot without giving the same amount of size reduction back. We've done >> > some recent tests with LZMA, which compresses just as good as bzip2 at >> > the lowest compression rate, but does it at the same speed as gzip. >> >> About LZMA I should add that when using higher (actually the default) >> compression rate, compression is much better than bzip2 but takes more >> time/memory. Decompression however, which is what really matters in a >> packaging format, is kept fast and lightweight. > > What's the memory usage when unzipping an LZMA file? Is it much higher > than the needs of gzip? We already have problems supporting low-memory > systems with our installer, adding a compression algorithm that eats > more memory will cause even more problems for these systems. That's actually not entirely true. Dan and I investigated this. The previous low memory issues were caused by the entire install system never leaving the initramfs, and remaining entirely in RAM - which soaked far more than pacman ever will. Additionally, with the dynamic package patch (dunno if this is in the master branch yet), memory usage sank by leaps and bounds.
