Month: June 2010

Day in brief

  • I favorited a YouTube video — Fedora 13 Goddard http://youtu.be/KbCO0jT6L3Q?a #
  • Somehow nobody realized that one of the vital company servers runs on 1GB of RAM. And it's an old 1.6 dual-core machine, staffed with disks. #
  • I need a #wordpress plugin to send newsletter using posts of specific category.Subscribe/unsubscribe feature too.Please advise plugin.Thanks #
  • I favorited a YouTube video — Football is for girls … try RUGBY http://youtu.be/3icksHJDjA8?a #
  • I favorited a YouTube video — This is Rugby http://youtu.be/cEzh2tKgdI4?a #

Zip vs. Bzip2

While investigating an unrelated issue on our backup server, I came across an interesting discussion about gzip vs. bzip2. I was surprised to read on how much slower bzip2 is.  I even tested it on our server.  And as expected, I saw the huge difference.

$ du -sh home
819M  home

$ time tar czf test.tar.gz home
real	3m29.741s
user	1m4.026s
sys	0m5.629s

$ time tar cjf test.tar.bz2 home
real	11m38.751s
user	6m19.259s
sys	0m7.237s

$ ll test.tar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 leonid users 365987716 2010-06-29 13:08 test.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 leonid users 390655750 2010-06-29 12:56 test.tar.gz

For such a small difference in size, the compression time difference is huge! Of course, I should play with more parameters, repeat the tests several times, and test the decompression time too. But the above test is still a good indication. Way too many scripts out there use the default parameters and substitute gzip with gzip2 without any testing. That’s obviously asking for trouble.

Trailer : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Here is something to live for for all of you Harry Potter fans out there – an official trailer for “Harry Ptter and the Deathly Hallows”.  Apparently they stuffed so much into that part, that they had to break it into two.  I wonder how that will go with the movie going crowd and the pirates.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47OdmBKKwsU]