On Mon, 07 Aug 2000 16:20:36 -0600, John Caron wrote:
>this is very impressive; i wonder if this file happens to have a lot of
>zeroes or missing data or something?
>
>floating point is known to be difficult to compress due to the fact the
>low order bits are essentially random.
I haven't worked with bzip2 on many types of data yet, but I have
been thoroughly impressed with it in several areas, compressing
dramatically better than zip, compress, or gzip in about the same time
as gzip (somewhat slower than zip) and decompressing pretty quickly.
Although when I tried it on a couple of several MB netCDF files I had
(arps runs) I didn't see any real improvement over gzip or zip,
I'd say its definitely worth trying if you have any in-house
compression needs.. it isn't heavily used yet, but I have seen lots
of systems start to use it in the last couple months because of the really
substantial improvement in compression for some applications.
bcl
