Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 17:13:45 -0800 (PST) From: Steven G Kargl <kargl@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> To: davidg@Root.COM Cc: phk@ref.tfs.com, freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: install compressed binary patch Message-ID: <199503140113.RAA16127@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <199503140103.RAA00471@corbin.Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Mar 13, 95 05:03:32 pm
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According to David Greenman: > > >> Wouldn't you gain more diskspace if you told cc(1) about ".gz" files for > >> instance ? source compress better than binary I'd expect... > > > >Actually, make world was a (poor?) example. But, consider the installation > >on a production machine of some of the ports. The binary for Octave was over > >4 MB before compression. With `gzip -9', the binary is around 750 KB. I get > >similar compression for other large binaries. > > > >The `-z' would be useful perhaps for XFree86 where the site.def(?) file allows > >one to specify the install program and install flags (if i recall correctly). > >Then, you can automatically have X built with compressed binaries. > > Keep in mind the following when using gziped binaries: > > 1) The file is paged from swap, not from the executable. This means > you'll need a lot more swap space. Do you have some rule of thumb? I usually go with 2 * RAM, but if this is not sufficient what is necessary. > 2) There is no sharing with gziped binaries. This means that you'll > need a lot more memory (and swap space). > 3) Decompression requires a lot of CPU. > > Those three reasons make it impractical to gzip binaries that will be used > often or ones where multiple copies are used concurrently (like a shell for > instance). > I agree that you would use this wisely. It would be system suicidal for sh, csh, cc, etc... to be compressed. But, on the other hand some utilities on my system are rarely used, but are nice to have if suddenly required. It seems illogical to me to have the capability to run compressed binaries, but require a post system installation compression of binaries to regain some disk space: %cd /some/dir %foreach file (list_of_files_to_process) foreach> gzip $file ; mv $file.gz $file foreach> end -- Steven G. Kargl | Phone: 206-685-4677 | Applied Physics Laboratory | Fax: 206-543-6785 | University of Washington |---------------------| 1013 NE 40th St | FreeBSD 2.1-current | Seattle, WA 98105 |---------------------|
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