Quote:
Originally Posted by chikorita157
I was mainly talking about NTFS compression... NTFS compression does not actually compresses the file in a different format, it transparently compress and decompress which could make it faster even if most laptops ship with slower 5400 RPM HD, which can make it faster. You have only mentioned compression not done by the filesystem (e.g. zip/rar/etc compression/decompression).
This is pretty much sums up what I was talking about with NTFS compression:
I tried NTFS compression on my older Macbook Pro with Vista and it gives me poor results and slow performance, mainly because I compressed the OS files which is not recommended... and also the CPU being taxed by the Anti-Virus software. It's safe to apply NTFS compression on Program Files and documents since they aren't being accessed as much as the system files, just don't apply NTFS compression to the whole HD, it's not a good idea.
Another thing to be careful with NTFS compression is that files will fragment more quickly, which can be the cause of slow performance. It's best to defragment the whole hard drive every week to avoid that.
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On server systems one would use a raid system which is faster to begin with. So there can be significant additional load.
LZ77 is very fast when decompressing. I wrote an LZ77 decompressor with decrypter for the archive files of a certain 3D game in C# and never actually had a performance issue with reading data (hdd would be the major bottleneck). But writing compressed is definitly slower (depending on compression level) and more of a performance issue.
Now when a system boots up, all the system files will be loaded into RAM. Reading is not the real performance issue even for system files. But there is the local disk cache (pagefile) that is heavily used in Windows (even when it technically isn't necessary because of a large RAM - especially in Vista). This one file will be written a lot and hence is a performance killer. Similar files are the working copies for the registry and other such working copies that are persistent for only one user session.
edit:
Actually the pagefile could be moved to an uncompressed partition (if available) to speed things up a little bit.