jim@haring.UUCP (07/15/84)
I have been fiddling with the compress/uncompress programs posted by Spencer Thomas. I found a couple of bugs and also removed the Vax `asm's, with no appreciable performance loss. (I've tested it on a SUN). The problem is that it is a memory hog, and I'm still wondering how to make it run with less. Our interest is that we use compaction on all our news batching since we use international rates a lot. The observed compression we get with compact/uncompact is around 33% on news traffic. The new compress program gives 57% on the same 600K byte sample of net.unix-wizards. But the nice thing is that it is also much faster, >5 times, and I haven't profiled it yet. Since we are all comparing pack/compact/compress type programs, perhaps we should all be running tests on (approximately) the same data, say some large manual section, chunk of source, etc? Time, compression-ratio and memory demand can all be traded off, but (unmodified) compact/uncompact looks a loser in any case. Jim McKie Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Amsterdam ..mcvax!jim