Multicore version of bzip2 compression utility
cilk.com
cilk.com
since it does everything in memory it dragged my system into a swapping hell
Well, it just keeps pending blocks in memory. It should be quite easy to bound the worst-case memory consumption (at some cost to parallelism), as they note in the article.
The version from clik was released today. Parallel bzip2 has been around for at least a couple of years. In fact, just doing a search for parallel bzip2 will lead you right to both an SMP/threaded version as well as one that uses MPI. I am guessing this is what was being referred to regarding the memory-consumption issues.
Though looking again, it seems like it's a separate implementation.
"The only reason to go bzip2 is if you need the file compressed as rapidly as possible to a reasonable size.
On pure efficiency / energy, 7zip wins, despite bzip2 using 4x the CPU time."