gzip, bzip2 and xz

[Jesper Skou Jensen]

Hi guyz,

At the moment I'm using gzip to compress my argus logfiles but I would 
like to save more harddisk-space.

One option is to use bzip2, but it's much much slower than gzip both on 
compress/write but most important on decompress/read, and because of 
that it's not really a viable option for me.

xz on the other hand is VERY slow at compressing (doesn't matter for me, 
it's just a batch job in the background) but decompresses just as fast 
at gzip. The major advantage with xz is the huge save in compressed 
filesize you get. A few quick tests shows 36% saved when compared to 
bzip2 and 41% when compared to gzip.

File compressor;Bytes
uncompressed argus file;105268632
gzip;39122641
bzip2;36041236
xz;22977764
xz with -e and -9; 22600708

As you can see there's only a very small gain with the last "xz -e -9", 
and it takes MUCH longer to compress, so it's probably not useful in 
real-life situations. But the xz itself looks promising.

Unfortunately Argus clients doesn't read xz by default and I would have 
to make my own wrapper for this to work. Would it be possible to add xz 
as native supported compression format for the Argus clients?


--
Regards
Jesper