Hacker News Reader

Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Saving disk space is certainly useful for rarely used apps

Is it really? I can't recall the last time I ran into disk space issues, must have been in the 1990s.

Really? I constantly run into disk space issues. Apple still ships their flagship 13" macbook pro 128gb storage and they charge $200 for another 128gb. While other manufacturer's laptops charge a lot less for storage these days, most still only come with 256 which is not enough these days for development IMO.

Even on my desktop, I managed to fill 750GB with various VMs and android development tools (the SDKs, etc). While I am not sure how much compression could have saved me, it could still be worth it (especially since I only use certain VMs or SDK version once a month).

Yeah, then stop burying yourself with Apple devices.

Anyways, it makes sense to maintain something like an LRU cache, and compress only the least used things.

Why would you? lz4 decompresses at ~5GB/s on a modern CPU [1] with good compression ratios, that's still more than most SSDs can push nowadays. Most applications are small fraction of that size on-disk.

The problems arise when you start using xz-compressed squashfs images. LZMA2 is optimized for compression ratio and typically decompresses several times slower than even zlib deflate (which is already ~10 slower than lz4).

[1] https://github.com/lz4/lz4

Yeah... and when something is truly large it generally doesn't compress well anyway as the large assets are embedded media files; I don't understand the point of compressing stuff like this :/.

I still don't understand though. I run on btrfs with compression turned on and have noticed 0 performance issues. Only with snaps as mentioned.

I run on disk space issues almost monthly, and I have a fair amount of terabytes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com