hannes
7th January 2004 20:50 UTC

Compression question
Hi,

I am just wondering if someone can give me a discription of the difference bewteen solid and non solid compression.

- Hannes.

Joost Verburg
7th January 2004 20:51 UTC

When using solid compression all files are compressed toghether which can improve compression results.

hannes
7th January 2004 20:57 UTC

so that is the better one to use, and that is on by default?
and wow for the super fast answer :)

Joost Verburg
7th January 2004 22:19 UTC

For LZMA and BZIP2 it's enabled by default. For ZLIB not, because it doesn't really improve the results for that one.

myne
8th January 2004 06:59 UTC

Solid =
Grab ALL files and append them together as 1 big file with an index and THEN compress.

Non-Solid = Compress all files and THEN append them all together with an index.

Solid is good because it theoretically allows everything to be compressed together. However, in NSIS's case it requires the entire archive to be decompressed before any files can be written to the HDD. This caused me a problem because my particular case involved installing 930mb worth of files. This meant that there had to be a MINIMUM of 1860mb (930mb temp + 930mb installed) free on the c: if it was to be installed into the c:.