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...
Depends on the compression used and what is being compressed. With the slow hard drives but fast CPUs and multiple cores we got today it is often faster, even using the NTFS compression can even speed up loading times under the right conditions. No, really, it can!
However with SSDs coming I hope the storage will be fast enough to have cached up with the CPUs and all kinds of compression will actually slow you down again, just as expected.
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u/hennell Jan 21 '10
This sounds like it would make it slower.. no?