Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Mike Taht wrote:
> 
>>One difference is probably - mercurial appears to be using zlib's 
>>*default* compression of 6....
>>
>>using zlib compression of 9 really impacts git...
> 
> 
> I agree that it will hurt for big changes, but since I really do believe 
> that most changes are just a couple of files, I don't believe it matters 
> for those. 
> 
> I forget what the exact numbers were, but I did some timings on plain
> "gzip", and it basically said that doing gzip on a medium-sized file was
> not that different for -6 and -9. Why? Because most of the overhead was
> elsewhere ;)

Certainly not different in the overall numbers, but after trying gzip on 
a bunch of various source files on 32 bit CPUs, from P-II to Xeon, it 
looks as if after 7 the cpu jumps about 40% to 8, and another 30% to 9. 
Neither 8 nor 9 give any significant size improvement (< 2%).

Again, this is 32 bit CPU and just the gzip component, reading from 
stdin and writing to stdout which I hope gets directory operations out 
of the time measure.

Sample attached.

-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me