> Compression tradesoff compute vs i/o, if your system has weak compute, it's a bad deal. Most modern systems should do well with compression.

Older systems with worse compute also had worse i/o. There are cases where fast compression slows things down, but they're rare enough to make compression the better default.

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1718627440 a day ago | parent [-]

I certainly don't want my compiler to get slower, because we now compress the files that are gone in a few minutes anyway. Compression is useful for archiving files, but for anything that you currently work with, it's useless and only wastes compute.

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Dylan16807 12 hours ago | parent [-]

If you're limited by your SSD, one core running lz4 (or zstd) will double your write speed for object files. If you're not writing hundreds of megabytes per second, then you'll barely notice the overhead at that phase while it makes later phases that load the data back snappier.

If everything fits in ram then compression could be postponed.

And for that area in between, where your files don't fit in ram but compressed they would fit in ram, compression can give you a big speed boost.

	▲	1718627440 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's true. I think less memory is often accompanied with less compute. For example "one core running" is 50% of my available compute.