Hi,
at Wikimania they were a few discussions about the pertinence to push
ZIM, especially if you think EPUB is already really good supported, it's
also open, it's also compressed, etc. I made (again) a small benchmark
to try to convince the last people who are skeptical.
Here is an example with Simple English Wikipedia without pictures:
* Raw content
125342 HTML pages
1.4 GB
* ZIM
93 MB
Access time of article "Wikipedia" (HTML only) = 0.012s
* ZIP
331 MB
Access time of article "Wikipedia" (HTML only) = 0.035s
Additional infos:
* ZIP random access time is proportional to the count of files, with 3
more HTML files, accessing the same content takes 0.113s (so almost x3)
* Please keep in mind that the test were ran on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7
CPU X 980 @ 3.33GHz
* They are no images here... which are often bigger and which would be
re-compressed unnecessarily and so bigger in a ZIM
* Articles with 20-30 images are common.
* Benchmark was made with not so much files... The French Wikipedia has
many millions of files
I let you take the conclusion by yourself ;)
Regards
Emmanuel