[fitsbits] Rice compression from the command line

[Arnold Rots]

Mark,

Sorry, I must have mixed my numbers up.
I did it again and the difference is less stark:

FITS binary table
Uncompressed size: 49.7 MiB

                compress          uncompress
           U+S/E(s) MiB  (%)       U+S/E(s)
          -------------------     ----------
gzip        55/  61 29.7 (60%)       9/ 20
bzip2      135/ 140 26.2 (53%)      42/ 52

On a quiet SunBlade under Solaris 2.8

  - Arnold

Mark Calabretta wrote:
> 
> On Wed 2006/07/19 09:47:45 -0400, Arnold Rots wrote
> in a message to: Mark Calabretta <mcalabre at atnf.csiro.au>
> and copied to: Rob Seaman <seaman at noao.edu>, fitsbits at nrao.edu
> 
> >I did a simple test using bzip2 for event files on Solaris.
> >Sure, I got 15% savings over gzip and I'm not worried about the
> >compression taking about twice as long.  But the decompression taking
> >an order of magnitude longer than gunzip bothers me.  Even if it is
> >more than compensated for by what's gained in transmission time, the
> >users' perception will be that things are worse, since decompression
> 
> I agree that for data distribution it's the end-user experience that
> counts.
> 
> However, I'm skeptical of the order of magnitude figure.  The worst I
> saw was x3 in elapsed time which is what a user would perceive but
> typically it was between x1.5 and x2.  Do you have figures for this
> test similar to those I sent?
> 
> Cheers, Mark
> 
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Arnold H. Rots                                Chandra X-ray Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                tel:  +1 617 496 7701
60 Garden Street, MS 67                              fax:  +1 617 495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138                             arots at head.cfa.harvard.edu
USA                                     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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