

Multicore version of bzip2 compression utility - threadman
http://www.cilk.com/multicore-blog/bid/9185/A-Parallel-bzip2

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wheels
Tried it before and found it completely useless. The only place I cared about
using parallel compression / decompression was on large files, and since it
does everything in memory it dragged my system into a swapping hell every time
that I used it.

~~~
neilc
You tried it, although it was just released today?

 _since it does everything in memory it dragged my system into a swapping
hell_

Well, it just keeps pending blocks in memory. It should be quite easy to bound
the worst-case memory consumption (at some cost to parallelism), as they note
in the article.

~~~
evgen
> You tried it, although it was just released today?

The version from clik was released today. Parallel bzip2 has been around for
at least a couple of years. In fact, just doing a search for parallel bzip2
will lead you right to both an SMP/threaded version as well as one that uses
MPI. I am guessing this is what was being referred to regarding the memory-
consumption issues.

------
Gompers
Jeff Atwood (from Coding Horror) ran a comparison of bzip2 on 8 cores against
7-Zip on 2 cores in February. bzip2 ran faster but generated larger files.

 _"The only reason to go bzip2 is if you need the file compressed as rapidly
as possible to a reasonable size.

On pure efficiency / energy, 7zip wins, despite bzip2 using 4x the CPU time."_

<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001231.html>

