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New File Format (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

zstd or leave

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They both have their use cases. Zstandard is for compression of a stream of data (or a single file), while 7-Zip is actually two parts: A directory structure (like tar) plus a compression algorithm (like LZMA which it uses by default) in a single app.

7-Zip is actually adding zstd support: https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/feature-requests/1580/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well when using zstd, you tar first, something like tar -I zstd -cf my_tar.tar.zst my_files/*. You almost never call zstd directly and always use some kind of wrapper.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, you can tar first. That has various issues though, for example if you just want to extract one file in the middle of the archive, it still needs to decompress everything up to that point. Something like 7-Zip is more sophisticated in terms of how it indexes files in the archive, so I'm looking forward to them adding zstd support.

FWIW most of my uses of zstd don't involve tar, but it's in things like Borgbackup, database systems, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, definitely. My biggest use is transparent filesystem compression, so I completely agree!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'll gunzip you to oblivion!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

zstd may be newer and faster but lzma still compresses more

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Thought I'd check on the Linux source tree tar. zstd -19 vs lzma -9:

❯ ls -lh
total 1,6G
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmo pmo 1,4G Sep 13 22:16 linux-6.6-rc1.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmo pmo 128M Sep 13 22:16 linux-6.6-rc1.tar.lzma
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmo pmo 138M Sep 13 22:16 linux-6.6-rc1.tar.zst

About +8% compared to lzma. Decompression time though:

zstd -d -k -T0 *.zst  0,68s user 0,46s system 162% cpu 0,700 total
lzma -d -k -T0 *.lzma  4,75s user 0,51s system 99% cpu 5,274 total

Yeah, I'm going with zstd all the way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Nice data. Thanks for reminding me why I prefer zstd

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

damn I did not know zstd was that good. Never thought I'd hear myself say this unironically but thanks Facebook

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

*Thank you engineers who happen to be working at Facebook

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Very true, good point

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As always, you gotta know both so that you can pick the right tool for the job.