To show just how significant parallelized algorithms can be, today I
discovered pxz, a parallelized version of the xz
compression utility, which I
use constantly. The proof is in the numbers:
Command | Before | After | Ratio | Time |
---|---|---|---|---|
xz pxz -9e | 2937M 2937M | 305M 281M | 0.104 0.096 | 32m 4m(!) |
I put this alias in my .zshrc
:
alias tar='tar --use-compress-program=pxz'
Note that to build pxz
on the Mac, I had to comment out a reference to
MAP_POPULATE
, which the OS X’s mmap
function doesn’t support.