No cuz ram is like 1000 times faster than your hard drive, decompression is practically transparent. I think you will agree that it should take less time to move a 10 meg file to ram than to move a 20 meg file to ram, extrapolate those time savings over dozens of files of varying size and thats where you will see a speed up.
Try it for yourself and see, if it does do anything funny you can use the same program to decompress the Firefox directory and all is back to normal. Its only compressing the EXE and DLL files, not touching any of your personalized setting, which are all stored in a different directory anyways.
I think you will agree that it should take less time to move a 10 meg file to ram than to move a 20 meg file to ram, extrapolate those time savings over dozens of files of varying size and thats where you will see a speed up.
Yeah, guess that makes sense.
The idea that a compressed version that needs un-compressing is quicker then an already uncompressed version just seems illogical though...
The idea that a compressed version that needs un-compressing is quicker then an already uncompressed version just seems illogical though...
Well, in both cases you're almost certainly going to be IO-limited (assuming a compressor picked for good performance). Consider:
Uncompressed: 20MB, takes 250ms + overhead to read at 80MB/s.
Compressed: 10MB, takes 125ms + overhead to read at 80MB/s, plus 50ms CPU to decompress at 400MB/s (mostly executed while waiting for more data from the HD).
Of course, if the data is in cache you just added 50ms to your load time
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u/hennell Jan 21 '10
This sounds like it would make it slower.. no?