martinus
15th December 2003 21:34 UTC

I, for one, welcome our new compression overlords
Using zip my installer is 7MB, using bzip2 it is 2.5MB, and with LZMA it is only 1.1MB.
Thanks for adding this excellent compression algorithm!

Joost Verburg
15th December 2003 21:41 UTC

That's a quite good improvement :) What type of data does your installer contain?

martinus
15th December 2003 22:58 UTC

The extracted size is about 18MB, and it contains a lot of dll's. Each dll has (for some odd reason) to be statically linked against the same other libraries, which results in a lot of 200kb big dll's. I guess most of the compression comes from the large buffer LZMA uses, so it can find better matches. bzip2 is restricted to only 900kb, I do not know which window size the zip algorithm has.

When having debug information in the dll's, the installed size was more than 40MB, and the LZMA compressed file is still only about 1.2MB.

In my experiments always LZMA does wonders when the files are highly compressible, like text, a lot of small, almost similar files, etc.

BTW, does nsis sort the files according to the file type? If this is well done, this could also improve compression a bit (at least for very large installers).

kichik
16th December 2003 12:15 UTC

Originally posted by martinus
BTW, does nsis sort the files according to the file type? If this is well done, this could also improve compression a bit (at least for very large installers).