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Diffstat (limited to 'src/alf.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | src/alf.rst | 20 |
1 files changed, 12 insertions, 8 deletions
diff --git a/src/alf.rst b/src/alf.rst index 4d48afc..0d2020e 100644 --- a/src/alf.rst +++ b/src/alf.rst @@ -170,14 +170,18 @@ a DOS capable of handling multi-megabyte files... Performance ----------- -Performance is *horrible*. This shouldn't be a real problem on -modern multi-GHz CPU, especially since most Atari 8-bit files are -small (usually under 64KB). Interestingly, it's not O(n^2), it scales -linearly, O(1): Compressing a 1.3MB text file takes 0.7 seconds on the -author's (rather modest) Intel i7 workstation, and a file 10x as large -takes approximately 10x as long (7 seconds). A 50KB file is almost -instantaneous, 0.05 seconds, which is more typical of the files you'd -actually use this with. +Performance is pretty good, as of alftools-0.3.0. For small files +like you'd use on an Atari (up to 50KB), it's basically instantaneous +(under 0.02 seconds) on the author's modest i7 workstation. For a 1MB +text file, it takes 0.05 sec; for 1MB of random garbage, it's 0.1 +sec (and the resulting ALF file is 36% larger than the garbage). + +By comparison, **zip** takes 0.6 seconds to compress the 1MB text file, +and 0.03 sec for the 1MB randomness (and the compressed file is still +larger than the input, but only by 312 bytes). The speed demon is **arc**\: +it compresses the text file in 0.03s, and it's smart enough to *not* +compress the random garbage (it uses the 'store' method, which **alf** +doesn't have). Timestamps ---------- |