Hi,
I looked into compression algorithms a bit in a previous role, and to be honest I'm quite surprised to see zstd proposed for package storage. zstd, according to its own github repo, is "targeting real-time compression scenarios". It's not really designed to be run at its maximum compression level, it's designed to really quickly compress data coming off the wire - things like compressing log files being streamed to a central server, or I guess writing random data to btrfs where speed is absolutely an issue.
Is speed of decompression a big user concern relative to file size? I admit that I am biased - as an Australian and with the crummy internet that my location entails, I'd save much more time if the file was 6% smaller and took 10% longer to decompress than the other way around.
Did you consider Google's Brotli?
Regards,
Daniel
On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 9:58 PM, Julian Andres Klode <julian.klode@canonical.com> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 11:06:11AM +0100, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> We had a coding day in Foundations last week and Balint and Julian added support for zstd compression to dpkg [1] and apt [2].
>
> [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892664
> [2] https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/merge_requests/8
>
> Zstd is a compression algorithm developed by Facebook that offers far
> higher decompression speeds than xz or even gzip (at roughly constant
> speed and memory usage across all levels), while offering 19 compression
> levels ranging from roughly comparable to gzip in size (but much faster)
> to 19, which is roughly comparable to xz -6:
>
> In our configuration, we run zstd at level 19. For bionic main amd64,
> this causes a size increase of about 6%, from roughly 5.6 to 5.9 GB.
> Installs speed up by about 10%, or, if eatmydata is involved, by up to
> 40% - user time generally by about 50%.
>
> Our implementations for apt and dpkg support multiple frames as used by
> pzstd, so packages can be compressed and decompressed in parallel
> eventually.
More links:
PPA: https://launchpad.net/~canonical-foundations/+ archive/ubuntu/zstd-archive
APT merge request: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/merge_requests/8
dpkg patches: https://bugs.debian.org/892664
I'd also like to talk a bit more about libzstd itself: The package is
currently in universe, but btrfs recently gained support for zstd,
so we already have a copy in the kernel and we need to MIR it anyway
for btrfs-progs.
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