Re: Fw: [Groff] [groff/patch] transparent gzip

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

On Sunday, August 25, 2002 7:29 AM,
Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote referring to the unbearable
subtleness of being:

> Hi,
>
>> In this hysteric times, when hard-drives are one US dollar per
>> gigabyte, 80 GB hard-drives are the norm and CPUs with hardware
>> clocks slower than 1.3 Gigahertz are obsolete, talking about the
>> supposed need to compress man pages seems pointless to me.
>
> Fair enough.  gzipping all man pages under /usr/share/man has saved
> only 40% of the space on this ext3 filesystem according to du(1).

Hmm... I can do the same under ntfs (at least the version that win2k and
winxp use). And savings are in the same order. Yup, I can live with
filesystem level compression.

I do have an observation, ignore real times as they only reflect how soon I
remembered to quit the pager. This is using cygwin.

Manual page with system level compression. Fed by man into gtroff(1) and
less(1):

address@hidden ~
$ time man fortune

real    0m5.155s
user    0m0.560s
sys     0m0.470s

Now that the same manual page from the cat directories, no system level
compression, gzipped. Fed by man(1) through gzcat(1) and less(1):

address@hidden ~
$ time man fortune

real    0m3.137s
user    0m0.410s
sys     0m0.570s

Notice that user and system times have changed but the total values are
basically the same. This gives me a very skeptical outlook on the matter.