Articles tagged with "compression"

1. Evaluating Zstandard compression

   Recently I became aware of the zstd compression program. I wanted to see how it stacks up against gzip, bzip2 and xz.

   TL;DR

   Compression with zstd is blisteringly fast.

   But xz still yields the smallest files.

2. Should system backups be compressed?

   Every now and then I make backups of my FreeBSD system’s filesystems with the venerable dump program. This is the only program that can capture all features of the UFS filesystem. The filesystems to be backed up are:

   • The root filesystem.
   • The /usr filesystem.
   • The /var filesystem.

   Note

   My …

3. XZ compression

   With the release of FreeBSD 8.1, the xz compression program has been imported into FreeBSD. I decided to do some testing to compare it to the bzip2 format. In this test I’ve used the standard non-multithreaded implementations of these compression programs.

   

   Tests

   First I compressed my procmail logfile …