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Comment by rualca | Hacker News Reader

You're admittedly talking about a difference in compression rate of 13MB in a 1400MB package, and a 5s difference in writing a 1400MB file to disk.

Come on, let's be honest here: that's nitpicking.

Unless you are running batch processes that store TB of compressed data, no one would even bother to switch app for thosd residual gains.

Let's put it this way: would you get any VC fund if your sales pitch was "I can improve compression in a 1400MB package by 13MB and shorten file write times by 5 seconds"? Odds are, you'd be asked why not just gzip it and get it over with.

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> You're admittedly talking about a difference in compression rate of 13MB in a 1400MB package, and a 5s difference in writing a 1400MB file to disk.

> Come on, let's be honest here: that's nitpicking.

I agree on the compression size (13 megabytes is really not very much difference) but the decompression speed improvement really is remarkable. It's an order of magnitude of difference! Amortize that over every time you make a webrequest that has to decompress data, it makes a huge difference.

I'm mostly in the "gzip is good enough" camp, but a speed improvement of 10x is not nitpicking.

> Let's put it this way: would you get any VC fund if your sales pitch was "I can improve compression in a 1400MB package by 13MB and shorten file write times by 5 seconds"? Odds are, you'd be asked why not just gzip it and get it over with.

I agree but have a different takeaway: it’s why VCs aren’t the be all and end all. Such an improvement is worth the time invested to create it. It won’t change the world but spanned across the entire globe it’s a very notable step forward. That a VC can’t get hockey stick growth and a lucrative return out of it doesn’t invalidate the idea.

5.3s at 1.4gb on a laptop is 53ms at 14mb, is >70ms on mobile before adding any increased download time. 14mb is one retina image, even Reddit already weighs 8mb. It's silly to pretend this stuff doesn't matter, you can't even get search ranking without addressing it, for reasons that don't require concocted scenarios to explain.

Your difference might be mainly single threaded vs multi threaded decompression. This doesn't typically transform into a real-world speedup when browsing the web, as one will typically run multiple decompression streams in parallel anyway. Zstd is definitely an improvement on Gzip, but not by that much.

> 5.3s at 1.4gb on a laptop is 53ms at 14mb, is 70ms on mobile before adding any increased download time.

Factor in how much time it takes you to unpack those 1.4GB of data in a smartphone. Those 5s amount to which percentage of the total execution time?

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