Any better compression utility

[shieh]

I am using "compress" to compress tar file(oracle DB). However it just takes too long for big files. Switching to gzip, zip and zcat won't help too much either. Any recommendations to speed it up or some other utilities?

Thanks in advance.

Shieh

 

[Chacalinc]

I don't think you will find something like that... compress utilities require CPU in order to compress, so if you file is too big, then you need lot of process power and lot of time. In fact gzip is faster than others (try bzip2, oof!! horrible, but get better compression)

Cheers.

 

[shieh]

Thank you. I will try gzip and bzip2.

 

[Chacalinc]

bzip2 is very very slow, beware... gzip is faster than bzip2, but bzip2 has a better compression rate than gzip

 

[KenCunningham]

How do you mean 'too long'? Can you not just put the job in the background and get on with whatever you're doing?

 

[Michael42]

Perhaps use nice if you must do many simultaneous operations.

Thanks,

Michael42

 

[shieh]

bzip2 is really slow after trying. Normally I have more than 100GB database for tar and compress daily. The uncompress takes more time to finish by the way. We have to backup/restore few times a day some occasions, so a better utility may be needed.