Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-02-16 07:10:58 - Graham Ellis
Disc drives have got much faster since my youth ... and processors at have got much much MUCH faster in the same period. So, 30 years ago, we used to compress files to store them on the disc when we knew we weren't likely to keep needing them, but we didn't compress them as a matter of course as we knew it would then take quite a while if we wanted toi get at them.
With the enormous increase in processor speed compared to disc speed, the balance has changed. These days, it's quicker to read a small file from disc and uncompress it than to read a much larger file, so compressionn has become the norm. That's why utilities such as jar compress files by default these days, and why Java applications are often run straight out of the jar.
Disc drives have got much faster since my youth ... and processors at have got much much MUCH faster in the same period. So, 30 years ago, we used to compress files to store them on the disc when we knew we weren't likely to keep needing them, but we didn't compress them as a matter of course as we knew it would then take quite a while if we wanted toi get at them.