distribution tape compression

[Kanef@CHARON.arc.nasa.gov (Bob Kanefsky)]

    Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1991 07:06 PDT
    From: s9274@srl1.LANL
    
	anyone know the relative tradeoffs of using compressed versus
	non-compressed files when writing dist tapes?
    
    On the negative side, the compression and decompression is obviously
    comsuming extra time, but I have not noticed a significant slowdown in
    writing tapes. (I have not done any actual time comparisons.) As far as
    problems due to data loss, I have not experienced any to date.

It's possible that it's actually \faster/ to read a compressed file from tape,
since the bottleneck may be the tape speed and not the processor speed.  I
think I've even noticed it being faster to read a compressed file from a UNIX
box across a TCP-FTP connection, though now that I'm using NFS the compressed
file (621K) seems to take twice as long to read as the normal file (1182K).

--Kanef