Re: Compressing release packages better

[Bruno Haible]

Lasse Collin wrote:
> I suggest using the -T1 option when compressing gettext since xz's
> threading doesn't speed it up much with -8e: for 151 MiB input it's less
> than two threads on average (if you don't tweak the settings further).
> With -9e, a second thread wouldn't start until the input size exceeds
> 192 MiB and if it some day does, it will hurt compression. The -T1 or
> --threads=1 is supported in xz 5.0.0 already for forward compatibility.
> 
> Enabling the threaded mode by default in xz 5.6.x was a tricky decision
> due to things like this.

I appreciate that you choose the best mode, as the developer, in order to
avoid pushing complexity to the users. One of the gettext programs is
multithreaded as well, and it's a feature that users don't need to know
about it — it just provides a speedup when possible.

Bruno