pack vs. compress

[G.R.Tomasevich]

These are the two we have.  I used a 564-block (285684 bytes) file of
station message detail records, which has mostly digits and spaces.  Each
line is a record of telephone call info from a field experiment.  The
system in 5.2 on a VAX-11/785 with a heavy load, according to a system
monitor running in a layer on my Blit.  Both real time ~ 45 sec.

command		compression	comp size	user	sys
  -		original	564 blks	 -	 -
pack		57.8%		239 blks	7.33s	2.70s
compress	78.27%		131 blks	8.38	1.96s

I have over 4k blocks of these compressed files, so the advantage of
compress is obviously worthwhile.

Another example is binary data from a terminal in the field experiment;
real time 112 sec and 77 sec respectively:

command		compression	comp size	user	sys
  -		original	1466 blks	 -	 -
pack		65.3%		 510 blks	17.46s	9.46s
compress	89.50%		 163 blks	17.51s	5.00s

We have tens of thousands of blocks (compressed) of these.
-- 
	George Tomasevich, ihnp4!twitch!grt
	AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ