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Date:      Wed, 15 Mar 2000 06:37:03 -0800
From:      Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
To:        Paul Robinson <wigstah@akitanet.co.uk>
Cc:        Luigi Rizzo <luigi@info.iet.unipi.it>, Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za>, Arnout Boer <arnout@xs4all.nl>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Why not gzip iso images?
Message-ID:  <20000315063703.H14789@fw.wintelcom.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003151431580.4176-100000@jake.akitanet.co.uk>; from wigstah@akitanet.co.uk on Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 02:43:27PM %2B0000
References:  <20000315055046.C14789@fw.wintelcom.net> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003151431580.4176-100000@jake.akitanet.co.uk>

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* Paul Robinson <wigstah@akitanet.co.uk> [000315 06:14] wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> 
> > And not that much even with that:
> > 
> > -rw-r--r--  1 bright  staff  647815168 Dec 28 19:23 3.4-install.iso
> > -rw-r--r--  1 bright  staff  625839147 Dec 28 19:23 3.4-install.iso.gz
> 
> I never thought I'd see the day that when considering sizes of downloads
> people would look at a saving of 22Mb, and would say 'that's not much'...
> 
> Fair enough, as a percentage it's marginal... but in countries where
> internet access is not cheap, in fact is prohibitively slow and expensive
> (the majority of the planet), I think this saving shows a little respect
> and concern for the less fortunate home user stuck with a 56K modem paying
> $x/hour where x can be anywhere between 0.5 and 5...
>  
> > that's not gzip -9, but I think I've done that in the past to the 
> > disks and it still didn't help all that much.
> 
> If you save 20Mb, over a reliable 56Kb modem, you've saved them somewhere
> in the region of one and a half hours... I think you guys are too used to
> your broadband... :)
> 
> Let's also assume that a mirrored FTP site is limited to XGb/mth... all it
> would take is for a 100 downloads to cause an extra 2Gb of that to be
> taken up.... 
> 
> Personally, I feel that everything that can be compressed for download,
> should be. It would speed up downloads, would be more economical in terms
> of bandwidth, cost and time, and I think would be generally considered
> respectful for those users with crappy links.

You're not going to get much sympathy from me... 

~ % ftp ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/release/i386/ISO-IMAGES/
Connected to wizard.freesoftware.com.
...
ftp> get 3.4-install.iso
local: 3.4-install.iso remote: 3.4-install.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (209,155,82,20,112,101)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for '3.4-install.iso' (647815168 bytes).
100% |**************************************************|   617 MB    00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
647815168 bytes received in 147.34 seconds (4.19 MB/s)

:)

Seriously though, there's no reason not to have the ISOs up in
compressed format though.  I guess given a choice between _only_
compressed or _only_ uncompressed I think uncompressed is better,
but if the space is available it would be nice to see compressed
images available.

Before anyone tries it here's bzipped (worse than gzip) results:
-rw-r--r--  1 bright  staff  647815168 Dec 28 19:23 3.4-install.iso
-rw-r--r--  1 bright  staff  629685893 Dec 28 19:23 3.4-install.iso.bz2

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]


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