[nylug-talk] Filesystems that Support Transparent Compression?

[Michael Bacarella]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 12:28:45AM -0400, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:
> > If the file were broken into 8192 byte chunks with each chunk compressed and
> > packed together, add an index which shows the mappings, I could see this
> > working pretty well.  You maintain random accessibility features and possibly
> > improve sequential read performance since one physical block read may yield
> > several blocks worth of data.
> Compression factor on that would suck. LZ doesn't perform well is your 
> buffer is that small. To try: take 1GB text file (compression factor 1:4). 
> Break it into 100000 8kb files. Compress each. You'll be lucky if you get 
> 1:2.

Yeah, you're right.  The moral of the story is this belongs in the
application layer. ;)