Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

The reason I assumed deduplication wouldn't be effective on TV shows is because the intro isn't always at the same point as most shows have a prelude these days. Since the preludes are of different lengths, it means that certain things like key frames (if used on that particular codec) would appear on different frames of the intro sequence. Which makes me wonder how effective deduping would be on older TV shows where the intro is at the start of the programme.

As for compression being largely ineffective, the shows are already compressed anyway. In fact file system compression seems to be less relevant these days as most modern file formats have compression built in (even Office documents are just ZIP files). But as the author said, the overhead for compression isn't damaging for the performance* of ZFS - unlike with deduplication

* ZFS compression is particularly performant† when using the newer lz4 algorithm available in OpenZFS - which I'd highly recommend people using if they're not already.

† I know "performant" isn't technically a word. But it should be.

If people use and understand the word "performant", it's a word. That's how language works.

It is a word in German. Went to check if the author might be German - and he is. http://dict.leo.org/#/search=performant&searchLoc=0&resultOr...

In the evolutionary sense languages, I agree. But there's also a lot of people who strictly disagree with slang, "verbing" and other colloquialisms - instead believing language should be applied strictly (people otherwise known as "language Nazis").

My "performant" footnote was just an attempt to pre-empt such attacks; though ironically including the footnote has now sparked the tangent itself.

Relevant Calvin & Hobbes: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

It's a fun thing to point out to those people how many of the words they're using to lambast you have actually changed meaning or are new words. They get -very- flustered and sulky.

The semantic problem I see with "performant", which is sharpened by the word transformation, is that there almost always multiple dimensions of performance.

For instance, "performance" in terms of time is relevant to all IT systems, but there is usually some other dimension, for instance, compression ratio or accuracy, that matters too.

Thus, "fast" is a better adjective when it applies because it is more clear.

In this instance, all of the above. It's faster and offers higher compression ratios LZJB: http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/LZ4+Compression

As for accuracy, well you'd expect any and all deflation compression to be 100% accurate anyway. Anything less than 100% would corrupt your data (unlike with audio / video "lossy" compression where you can remove / group non-perceivable data)

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