On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 19:39 +0200, Jan de Groot wrote: > 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. Yes it eats more memory in comparison to gzip, at least when high compression is chosen. But still the memory it uses is not much. From the official site of the LZMA utils: http://tukaani.org/lzma/benchmarks RAM usage on decompression gzip bzip2 lzmash lzmash -e 1 <1 MB 1 MB 1 MB - 2 <1 MB 2 MB 2 MB - 3 <1 MB 2 MB 1 MB 1 MB 4 <1 MB 2 MB 2 MB 2 MB 5 <1 MB 3 MB 3 MB 3 MB 6 <1 MB 3 MB 5 MB 5 MB 7 <1 MB 3 MB 9 MB 9 MB 8 <1 MB 4 MB 17 MB 17 MB 9 <1 MB 4 MB 33 MB 33 MB The memory usage of lzma stays competitive with bzip2 when files have been compressed with "lzmash -6" or with a smaller option. The files compressed with the default "lzmash -7" can still be decompressed, even on machines with only 16 MB of RAM, but sometimes you don't have even that much memory available. If you compress with "lzmash -8" or "lzmash -9", you should think if the users need to be able to decompress your files also on "ancient" computers. I fully understand the license problem and personally I am pretty happy with the gzip algorithm, I am just pointing facts so that a technically correct conclusion is reached. Dimitris
