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.