Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!cogsci.berkeley.edu!jsilva
From: jsilva@cogsci.berkeley.edu (John Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: GSARC - non-compatible more efficient archiver
Summary: PK's speed outweighs GSARC's compression
Message-ID: <6686@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 21 Oct 88 07:16:43 GMT
References: <KPETERSEN.12439480029.BABYL@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: jsilva@cogsci.berkeley.edu.UUCP (John Silva)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 20

After downloading GSARC from simtel20, I ran my own tests comparing GSARC
to PK 3.61.  I timed both on compression of 1.1MB of text files, and 1.6MB
of binaries (my bin directory).

I didn't write the figures down, but I remember that the text archiving
took about 1.1 minutes under GSARC, and only 30 seconds under PK.  The 
filesize savings was about 25K.  (275K for GS, 300 for PK).
For the binaries, I don't recall the times offhand (the ratio was somewhat
better than with the text, however), but the disk space saved was only about
50K compared to PK.

GSARC may represent a breakthrough in compression, but for my needs PK's
phenomenal speed far outweighs GSARC's less impressive increases in 
compression efficiency.

-J.
---
John P. Silva
INTERNET : jsilva@cogsci.berkeley.edu           "You don't know what you're
UUCP     : {backbone}!ucbvax!cogsci!jsilva       getting into, friend..."