Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 16:24:33 -0800 (PST)
From: "Steven M. Schultz" <sms@moe.2bsd.com>
Message-Id: <199803250024.QAA14701@moe.2bsd.com>
To: pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Subject: Re: More on Disk Images -> Disk
Sender: owner-pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Precedence: bulk

Warren -

>From: Warren Toomey <wkt@henry.cs.adfa.oz.au>

> Now, what I've currently got will cope with -b12 compressed files. Can
> someone tell me if it would be feasible to fit a gunzip into 64K?? Even
> if it could only cope with gzip -1 files.

	If my understanding of 'gzip' is right then the alogrithm works on
	32kb blocks of data and the '-N' level has little to do with the
	memory consumption.  Rather, as the -1, ... -9 level increases the
	amount of work that gzip puts into the compression increases (the
	difference between -6 and -9 is only a few percent in final output
	size but the length of time taken is quite a bit higher).

	Of concern would be getting the gzip sources to compile with a non-ANSI
	compiler on a non-32bit machine (sizeof (long) == sizeof(int) is an
	endemic assumption I wager).  Well, ok - there is the worry that
	you will grow old waiting for it to compress something ;-)  Gzip is a 
	lot more cpu intensive than compress.

	Steven