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

[jacob]

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)

I guess I mainly agree with you in this case, but in the OP's defense (and acknowledging that he was probably too quick on the draw here), maybe like many of us he's just fed up with the ubiquitous bitching about tech decisions just because Someone's Pet Thing didn't get selected. It's all the time why Qt, why not GTK? Why snap, why not flatpak? Why Linux, why not ***BSD? Not to mention the special category of whiners who always obsess about hobby projects, the more obscure the better it seems. Why GNOME, why not dwm? Why systemd, why not s6? Why Rust, why not Jai? Etc. Bottom line, people should either get a life, or get involved in the project they complain about.

[rektide]

the benchmarks include a 4.15 kernel that's probably why is lzo & not any other compression tested

[Raka555]

I guess I mainly agree with you in this case, but in the OP's defense (and acknowledging that he was probably too quick on the draw here), maybe like many of us he's just fed up with the ubiquitous bitching about tech decisions just because Someone's Pet Thing didn't get selected. It's all the time why Qt, why not GTK? Why snap, why not flatpak? Why Linux, why not ***BSD? Not to mention the special category of whiners who always obsess about hobby projects, the more obscure the better it seems. Why GNOME, why not dwm? Why systemd, why not s6? Why Rust, why not Jai? Etc. Bottom line, people should either get a life, or get involved in the project they complain about.

The constant hostility is getting to me. Why can't people voice their opinions without being attacked or attacking others the whole time ?
If someone has an issue with systemd or GTK or wayland or wathever, let them voice it.
People might actually learn something if every thread does not fray into mud slinging...

[geearf]

the benchmarks include a 4.15 kernel that's probably why is lzo & not any other compression tested

Hasn't LZ4 been in the kernel since 2013 or so, and in Squashfs since 2014? https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...tem&px=MTg2MzE

[cl333r]

Flatpaks and native always started much faster.

Any reason why flatpaks startup are faster than snaps?

[Veto]

Any reason why flatpaks startup are faster than snaps?

Because flatpaks are decompressed, when installed. The decompressed files are found in /var/lib/flatpak/app/<app>

Snaps are instead compressed SquashFS filesystem files, which are mounted individually and decompressed on the fly when run. The snap files are found in /var/lib/snapd/snaps and mounted to /snap/<app> at boot.

[cl333r]

Because flatpaks are decompressed, when installed. The decompressed files are found in /var/lib/flatpak/app/<app>

Snaps are instead compressed SquashFS filesystem files, which are mounted individually and decompressed on the fly when run. The snap files are found in /var/lib/snapd/snaps and mounted to /snap/<app> at boot.

Wow, now I definitely prefer flatpak.

[ssokolow]

Because flatpaks are decompressed, when installed. The decompressed files are found in /var/lib/flatpak/app/<app>

Snaps are instead compressed SquashFS filesystem files, which are mounted individually and decompressed on the fly when run. The snap files are found in /var/lib/snapd/snaps and mounted to /snap/<app> at boot.

...which is also why I wouldn't use snaps no matter how fast they start. I tried them and recoiled at how they gunked up my list of mounts with too many loopbacks... some of which didn't want to unmount properly.

[yoshi314]

Uh LZO? Why not zstd?

there are cases where zstd may use quite a lot of memory on unpack if files were compressed in a specific way.

not sure if this is the case with squashfs, but i had this in my postgresql setup where i tried to use zstd to pack my wal files. slave server would often go out with OOM when unpacking them for some mysterious reason. i had to switch to gz in that case, although i could have tweaked some zstd settings.

[ElectricPrism]

The Fat Just Got Fatter

All my homies use zlib:3