Though you have benchmarked a wrong thing. It’s decompression time that matters here, not compression. The image is compressed to make it load faster during boot and that’s the important metric here.I benchmarked it on my mkinitcpio image, and zstd with mkinitcpio's […]
I did my own benchmarks, though. On my decade-old system lz4 is still faster than zstd during decompression: 0.117415s (s=0.005948) vs 0.229915s (s=0.027075s). However, looking deeper, the time spent in syscalls suggests a different thing. lz4, having a bigger file, spent 0.049630s (s=0.007560s), while zstd 0.038125s (s=0.011196). That is not enough to claim they are different or zstd is better than lz4. But you can see in which direction it goes, in particular if one assumes a faster CPU+RAM.
Methodology: image compressed using lz4 and zstd (same options as Geert Hendrickx has used). Copied to 50 files to create a batch, flushed to disk. Decompression of each file into /dev/null timed separately with caches dropped between each batch. Each batch ran 4 times for the total sample size of 200 for each group.
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