gzip vs. bzip2 vs. rzip for log files
with my curiousity piqued by jeremy’s tests of gzip vs. bzip2 vs. rzip using a bunch of mail as the test data, i tried compressing an apache log file with the three tools, plus lzop:
| program | cpu time (s) | size |
|---|---|---|
| gzip | 19.210 | 28,362,079 |
| gzip -9 | 32.400 | 27,036,433 |
| bzip2 -9 | 849.489 | 15,496,248 |
| rzip | 147.460 | 18,823,330 |
| lzop | 3.240 | 48,719,254 |
| lzop -9 | 80.810 | 32,531,485 |
the original file size is 295,927,205.
it’s too bad rzip can’t decompress to a stream. that makes it much less attractive as a log compression solution.
