[Info-vax] MIPS vs. VUPS

[terry+googleblog at tmk.com]

On Wednesday, August 5, 2015 at 11:39:10 AM UTC-4, Paul Sture wrote:
> > If you're not tied to the [PK]ZIP format, pbzip2 is a multithreaded
> > implementation of the bzip2 compression format:
> > http://compression.ca/pbzip2
> 
> Thanks, I'll have a look.
> 
> I'm unsure for the original task but bzip2 is a supported alternative
> for other stuff in this area.

I don't think it has a VMS port, but that could probably be handled. What is more important is how many cores are available, which is presumably a lesser issue with newer Itaniums (Itanii?) and will not be an issue on x86. I'd also check to see how saturated the disk I/O subsystem gets from a single-threaded bzip2 - if you don't have excess disk performance, parallelizing the compression phase will be less of a win.

I regularly use pbzip2 for files > 250GB, but I have 24 fast x86-64 cores to throw at it and 4GB/sec disk I/O available.