On 01/03/2013 10:29 PM, Douglas Crosher wrote:
It might only make a performance difference. There
might be a new
container format that simply loads faster on average.
I am positive that LZMA2 is quite suited for JS in terms of performance
(or at least not worse than other compressors).
When we developed the ZIM file format we had small devices with only
little ressources in mind, the first users of openZIM were small gadgets
like the Ben NanoNote.
LZMA has the disadvantage that it is quite expensive in compressing but
gets better compression ration than others. On the other hand
decompression is quite cheap compared with others, so it was the perfect
choice for these small platforms.
There was a discussion whether we could go a step further for devices
with very limited memory and not decompress and cache a whole cluster
when accessing it but just use the parts from the decompression stream
we need and stop reading once we have all data needed, forgetting
everything else.
I think that has been implemented in zimlib.
/Manuel
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