🚀 go-pugleaf

duchad@aix02.ecs.rpi.edu (David Benedict Ducharme) writes:

>>4.  To anyone using it with a 40MB hard drive:  How much space did it add?
Pretty much double.  It really depends on what you are storing on your hard
disk.  Running stacker is like keeping _everything_ on your hard disk 
compressed, aka pkzip.

i.e.  If you have tons of gifs, digitized sounds, and programs compressed
with pklite, then expect _zero_ compression.

if you have normal everyday files, etc, expect roughly double.  (nice for
windows, since windows can't have pklite run on them)

If you got lotsa small files, then expect a surprising amount of 'compression'
due to merging these files and wasting less space.

>in addition I was wondering if, and how much Stacker affects the programs
>that are running.  Does it slow it down,

Well, for the most part, no.  According to my experimentation, Stacker has
some overhead when you 1st load the file, and after that, nothing.  So, if
you run a big file, no problem.

If you are opening and closing _lots_ of small files really fast, it slows
to a rock.  I discovered this when I was testing a stock analysis program I
had written - one of the algorithms computes a worksheet for each of the 200
individual companies, and saves a line of data from each one into a file.
then it loads the final file for analysis.  When doing this particular
analysis, the program sloooooowed way down.  besides that, it ran fine.

				- Frank Wang