bzip vs. gzip vs. zip, was Re: security through obscurity

[Gregory Boyce]

On Saturday 14 February 2004 11:36 pm, Chris Devers wrote:
> The one consistent thing seems to be that bzip *always* takes longer to
> both compress & decompress. Often, much longer.
>
> For a typical example of compressing source files, my tests suggest that
> bzip might compress to a file 10% than smaller than gzip, but it might
> take as much as 50% longer to do the compression, and a similar amount of
> additional time to decompress. I don't mean to suggest that these figures
> are universal or anything, but in my experience these numbers are a decent
> rule of thumb.
>
> The question then is whether possibly marginally better compression is
> worth the extra time tradeoff. It might be, but it's a tradeoff either
> way.

While true, we're talking about doing a comparison of two source trees that 
are already compressed with different compression ratios.  

To make the comparison a little bit better, I've taking my bzipped source 
tarball of linux-2.6.2, and recompressed it with zip (default compressoin 
level).

linux-2.6.2.zip	49M
linux-2.6.2.tar.bz2	33M