On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 5:01 AM Dan Sommers <2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > My situation is similar to Darren's: My primary connection > to the internet is through my cell phone carrier and a > mobile WiFi hot spot. In urban areas, I can get as much as > 50 megabits per second, but presently, due to my remote > location, it's around 5 or 6. I also have a monthly data > cap, which I share with my wife, and only WiFi (i.e., no > wires; that nice 300 megabits from hot spot to device is > shared by all devices, and there's a per device limit, > too). FWIW, I have an i7-7700HQ CPU. > > In the old days (when large files were a megabyte or two > and network bandwidth was measured in kilibits per second), > we assumed that the network was the bottleneck. I think > what Adam is propsing is that things are different now, and > that the CPU is the bottleneck. As always, it depends. :-) > > My vote, whether it has any weight or not, is for higher > compression ratios at the expense of CPU cycles when > decompressing; i.e., xz rather than zstd. Also, consider > that the 10% increase in archive size is suffered repeatedly > as servers store and propagate new releases, but that the > increase in decompression time is only suffered by the > end user once, likely during a manual update operation or an > automated background process, where it doesn't matter much. > > I used to have this argument with coworkers over build times > and wake-from-sleep times. Is the extra time to decompress > archives really killing anyone's productivity? Are users > choosing OS distros based on how long it takes do install > Open Office? Are Darren and I dinosaurs, doomed to live in > a world where everyone else has a multi-gigabit per second > internet connection and a cell phone class CPU? > > Jokingly, but not as much as you think, > Dan I think you're overstating your case a little bit. In the United States, nothing less than 25 Mbps can legally be called broadband, and the average download speed is approaching 100 Mbps (90% of us have access to 25 Mbps or better internet). Zstd -19 is faster overall than xz -6 starting at around 20 Mbps, so it's a better choice even on some sub-broadband connections. Your PassMark score is only about 50% better than that used on the Squash compression test, so I don't know that the computer speed element is significant. Furthermore, if space saving is the primary concern, why are we using the default xz -6 option, rather than something stronger like -9? I support using zstd because even in the absolute worst case (instant decompression), you're looking at less than a 10% increase in upgrade time, while for most users, a reduction of 50% would not be atypical (lzma is slow!). I'm not suggesting throwing out all concerns about disk space and transfer time, I'm just suggesting that times have changed *somewhat*, and that for most users zstd may provide a better trafe-off. In my case (100 Mbit connection), which is close to the US average, downloading and decompressing the latest Firefox package would take less than 1/3 the time it currently takes if we switched to zstd. Adam
