Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: zlib vs gzip

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Jack Lloyd wrote:
> Or: no compression, for people who have plenty of cheap disk and would
> prefer Monotone not bother compressing anything going to a local DB
> since it just slows things down, and are perfectly willing to trade a
> penny or two of platter space for even slightly faster interactive
> response from a tool they use a lot. (Raises hand)

If this would really affect disk space only, I'd agree. But monotone has 
to load the data very often. Thus it either needs disk throughput or it 
eats memory (when already cached).

Especially disk throughput is growing very slow compared to CPU-power 
(i.e. compression-throughput). From that point of view I don't 
necessarily think that compression slows down anything, rather quite the 
opposite (given a desktop system with a single spindle, not a server 
with a beefy disk subsystem).

And then there's netsync, which certainly needs compression. So we need 
to compress anyway at some point in time.

Regards

Markus