Actually, speed does matter, at least in applications here at work. We deal with log files of about 50 Gigabytes per month. Some compression algorithms would take days to compress the log files, so we had to find a utility with good speed and excellent text compression. So, with WinRar we are able to compress the files down to about 3 or 4 GB per month. It still takes several hours.
I don't see that much will be gained by copying files.. The files are already on an HP NetRaid controller with fast SCSI drives (Configured for RAID-5). What's slowing us down is our Pentium III 500Mhz quad-processor system running NT 4.0. What I end up doing is running four compressions at once so that I can fully use the processing power. A dual Pentium 4 at 2 GHz would be much faster, I believe, but it still takes time!
Its much more than 10% - Erik (kholm) did a quick speed comparison and posted the results but I cant find it ... the comparison was something like the following (for the 749 byte string):
Winning code: 2.5 seconds Fast code: 30 msecs
Its no big mystery or anything - the fast code is fast because it only needs to perform two passes of the data, and one pass of the "alphabet" 0-255 ... no matter how big the string is.
![[Wink]](images/icons/wink.gif){kind=icon}
![[Frown]](images/icons/frown.gif){kind=icon}
... the comparison was something like the following (for the 749 byte string):![[Eek!]](images/icons/shocked.gif){kind=icon}
