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From: richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: Compressed executables
Message-ID: <4001@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Jan 91 18:14:13 GMT
References: <1991Jan15.204849@IASTATE.EDU> <118868@uunet.UU.NET> <3977@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991Jan23.123808.22159@grep.co.uk>
Reply-To: richard@aiai.UUCP (Richard Tobin)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 14

In article <1991Jan23.123808.22159@grep.co.uk> vic@grep.co.uk (Victor Gavin) writes:
>And perhaps they could also explain why it doesn't slow the system down, coz if
>the processor has enough time to decompress something coming off the disk, it
>has enough time to go and run another program.

It seems pretty clear that it's trading cpu time for disk space and
disk accesses.  On a reasonably fast workstation with small slow
disks, it seems likely to be a winning tradeoff.

-- Richard
-- 
Richard Tobin,                       JANET: R.Tobin@uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,           ARPA:  R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.                UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin