Canonical's Snap Packaging Switching To LZO Compression For Faster Startup Times

[M@GOid]

maybe is slower, no ideia, the first startup is slow for snaps but after that is the same of deb packages

That is definitively not my experience here. And I'm on a SSD.

[Raka555]

My God. You Command Line geeks will bitch about anything and everything. Did you even read the blog post at Canonical? Did you see the performance improvements on different platforms? Great improvements!!

So if you REALLY think your particular compression fetish should have been used then get off your bitching asses and code. And then post your results. Otherwise STFU.

I suppose I have a duty to educate ...
Look at the decompression speed, which is what you want in this scenario. LZ4 blows everything else out of the water !

[damentz]

Definitely a missed opportunity to use LZ4 or ZSTD. Compared to Ubuntu's metric, Arch Linux really gained more from their switch away from XZ: https://www.archlinux.org/news/now-u...e-compression/

0.8% increase in package size, 1300% speedup in decompression.

[Raka555]

My God. You Command Line geeks will bitch about anything and everything. Did you even read the blog post at Canonical? Did you see the performance improvements on different platforms? Great improvements!!

So if you REALLY think your particular compression fetish should have been used then get off your bitching asses and code. And then post your results. Otherwise STFU.

And there always have to be someone flying of their handle when we are just having a civilised discussion as geeks about compression stuff (or anything else technical)

[peterdk]

I read in the snap forum that they eventually want to go for zstd, but need to support Ubuntu 18.04 which has no support for it. The end game would be to deliver snaps dynamically based on users system, but that will come much later ofcourse.

[elldekaa]

Uh LZO? Why not zstd?

This is covered specifically in my post, but mainly that zstd is not well supported in older distros we would like to support, bionic for instance does not support zstd compression (last I checked, perhaps the 18.04.4 update now supports it, but it did not originally).

We hope to some day be able to move to zstd for compression, but we want to be sure it is maximally compatible, or barring that we have a fallback mechanism for users who install a snap that their machine can’t decompress they will get an alternative snap file which is just compressed with something they support. That requires even more change than just allowing upload of lzo however.

source: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/applica...mance/17273/10

[microcode]

I read in the snap forum that they eventually want to go for zstd, but need to support Ubuntu 18.04 which has no support for it. The end game would be to deliver snaps dynamically based on users system, but that will come much later ofcourse.

Interesting, and also wow do they not have the ability to backport whole packages to older distros? I understand not wanting to ship new major versions of packages that exist in the distro (though honestly I don't usually see the point of this even) but surely there's no reason they can't just build Zstd and include it in the 18.04 repos?

[uid313]

Snap is so awfully slow!
Chromium takes forever to start on Ubuntu!
I think Ubuntu boots faster than it takes Chromium to start!

[Silverthorn]

Well... from my point of view snap is to slow, regardless of compression, considering apps can't even open local/remote files stored in non-supported places.

[discordian]

source: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/applica...mance/17273/10

Weird, is there something that need to run inside the snap for decompression? Why not just statically link zstd on the old platforms, how the hell do they get the luo snap support anyway if no new pkgs (just Bugfixes) are allowed...