Re: libpq compression

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 02:38:02PM -0500, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > So I've got very little patience with the idea of "let's put in some
> > hooks and then great things will happen".  It would be far better all
> > around if we supported exactly one, well-chosen, method.  But really
> > I still don't see a reason not to let openssl do it for us.
>
> Well, for toast compression the right choice is definitely one of the
> lz based algorithms (not libz!).  For transport compression you have
> the case of sending large data over very slow and/or expensive links
> in which case you want to use bzip type methods.  But in the majority
> of cases I'd probably be using lz there too.  So if I had to pick just
> one, there you go.  But which one? the lz algorithm with arguably the
> best pedigree (lzo) is gnu but there are many other decent candidates,
> some of which have really tiny implementations.
>
> merlin
>

+1 for a very fast compressor/de-compressor. lz4 from Google has
a BSD license and at 8.5X faster compression than zlib(-1) and
5X faster de-compression the zlib (-1), 2X faster than LZO even
would be my pick.

Regards,
Ken