Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ns-mx!umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu!williams
From: williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu (Kent Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Compression programs: compress vs lharc vs comic
Keywords: Compr. rate: comic, Speed: compress
Message-ID: <1815@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
Date: 8 Jul 90 16:32:17 GMT
References: <1822@tuegate.tue.nl>
Sender: news@ns-mx.uiowa.edu
Reply-To: williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu.UUCP (Kent Williams)
Organization: U of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
Lines: 19

I compiled comic on an Encore, and it appears to work.  It is V E R Y slow
compressing tars -- I didn't have the patience to let it run to completion
while I waited.  File sizes are impressive:

-rw-------  1 williams    81920 Jul  7 00:56 comic.tar
-rw-------  1 williams    31119 Jul  7 00:47 comic.tar.Z
-rw-------  1 williams    21696 Jul  7 01:06 comic.tar-X

I suspect the slowness comes in compressing the piles of nulls that
tar pads everything with.

Can the author summarize the algorithm used?  It looks as though too much
time is spent in looking for stuff -- maybe hashing could be used for
one or another step to speed things up.

--
Kent Williams                    'Look, I can understand "teenage mutant ninja 
williams@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu    turtles", but I can't understand "mutually 
williams@herky.cs.uiowa.edu      recursive inline functions".' - Paul Chisholm