Re: compressing intermediate files with LZO on the fly

From: David Lang
Date: Sat Apr 07 2007 - 22:06:07 EST


On Sat, 7 Apr 2007, Willy Tarreau wrote:

Hi Al,

On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 02:32:34PM +0300, Al Boldi wrote:
Willy Tarreau wrote:

... for some usages (temporary space),
light compression can increase speed. For instance, when processing logs,
I get better speed by compressing intermediate files with LZO on the fly.

How can you do that on ext3?

Also, can you do that on a partition block-io level?

No, sorry for the confusion. My scripts simply do :

$ lzop -cd file1.lzo | process | lzop -c3 > file2.lzo

With decent CPU, you can reach higher read/write data rates than what a
single off-the-shelf disk can achieve. For this reason, I think that
reiser4 would be worth trying for this particular usage. And in this case,
I'm not interested at all in reliability. It's just temporary storage. If
the disk fails, I throw it away and buy a new one.

I see the same thing with my nightly scripts that do syslog analysis, last year I trimmed 2 hours from the nightly run by processing compressed files instead of uncompressed ones (after I did this I configured it to compress the files as they are rolled, but rolling every 5 min the compression takes <20 seconds, so the compression is < 30 min)

now I just need to find a version of split that can compress it's output files.

David Lang
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