On Sun, 7 May 2006, Theodore Tso wrote:
quoted text
> 
> That brings up an interesting question though --- why not skip
> compressing files that are under 4k (or whatever the filesystem
> blocksize happens to be) if they are unpacked?  It burns CPU time;
> maybe not enough to be human-noticeable, but it's still not buying you
> anything.

Well, other filesystems don't have 4kB issues. Reiser can do smaller 
things iirc, and you might obviously have a ext3 filesystem with a 1kB 
blocksize too. And with tails on FFS, you might have a filesystem with a 
8kB blocksize, but despite that it might lay out <1kB files well.

Anyway, packing makes all this basically a non-issue. There are no block 
boundaries in a pack-file, and you only use a single inode. And you'd 
obviously want to pack for other reasons anyway (ie the delta compression 
will makea huge difference over time).

		Linus
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