Xref: utzoo alt.sources.d:632 comp.sources.d:5575 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!shelby!bu.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!xanth!galaxia!dave From: dave@galaxia.Newport.RI.US (David H. Brierley) Newsgroups: alt.sources.d,comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes Message-ID: <986@galaxia.Newport.RI.US> Date: 11 Jul 90 13:46:57 GMT References: <3114@psueea.UUCP> <11553@letni.UUCP> Organization: Dave's Very Own Personal System Lines: 26 In article sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes: >Compressing an article reduces phone time. If compress finds a file >is bigger after compression, it doesn't compress it. So the phone >costs really aren't increased by users doing their own compression. Almost, but not quite. If you run the compress program by typing "compress filename" and the resulting compressed file is bigger than the original then compress will save the original and delete the compressed file. On the other hand, if you type "compress f2" then the compress program will happily create an output file which is larger than the input file. Since news uses the compress program in a pipeline, this is essentially what happens. Here is an example: -rw-rw---- 1 dave family 73150 May 23 17:32 spool.sum compress test1.Z -rw-rw---- 1 dave family 15791 Jul 11 09:40 test1.Z compress test2.Z -rw-rw---- 1 dave family 23099 Jul 11 09:41 test2.Z As you can see, test2.Z is 46% larger than test1.Z. This was done using full 16bit compression. If you use 12bit compression, which a lot of sites are using, the results are even worse. -- David H. Brierley Home: dave@galaxia.Newport.RI.US {rayssd,xanth,att} !galaxia!dave Work: dhb@quahog.ssd.ray.com {uunet,sun,att,uiucdcs} !rayssd!dhb