Rzip compression tests

In the wake of yesterday's post about transferring large volumes of files, I decided to see how well rzip would fare when compressing a directory holding a built version of ffmpeg, compared to an unbuilt version.

FFMPEG svn checkout: built and ready to make install
Size Filename Ratio
67M ffmpeg 1.0
17M ffmpeg-compile.tar.bz2 3.94
19M ffmpeg-compile.tar.gz 3.52
5.4M ffmpeg-compile.tar.rz 12.4

It works rather well. But does an unbuilt version of the same source compress better?

FFMPEG svn checkout: unbuilt
Size Filename Ratio
30M ffmpeg-unbuilt 1.0
4.0M ffmpeg-unbuilt.tar.bzip2 7.5
5.2M ffmpeg-unbuilt.tar.gz 5.77
2.3M ffmpeg-unbuilt.tar.rz 13.0

Yes, it would appear to compress better. Text has more redundancy than binary files, after all.

But how much is the compression affected by the fact that these are subversion working copies? Let's see

FFMPEG source: svn export
Size Filename Ratio
13M ffmpeg-nosvn 1.0
2.1M ffmpeg-nosvn.tar.bz2 6.19
2.5M ffmpeg-nosvn.tar.gz 5.2
2.1M ffmpeg-nosvn.tar.rz 6.19

Yes, the compression ratios are affected substantially: rzip loses its lead once you strip out the redundant files in the .svn directories. Rzip is also proportionately better at compressing the version with binaries than any of the other compression methods, though the compression on that set of files is lackluster. Compressing builds of programs should -- in general -- be avoided.

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