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

[phoronix]

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

The Snap packaging / software deployment effort led by Canonical for Ubuntu and other distributions currently relies on XZ compression of the SquashFS-based archives while moving forward they are planning to make use of LZO compression. Snap'ing with LZO will result in faster startup-times at the cost of larger packages...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Canonical-Snap-LZO

[Raka555]

If it was my call, I would have used LZ4 HC instead.

[skeevy420]

If it was my call, I would have used LZ4 HC instead.

My first thought as well.

[andre30correia]

If it was my call, I would have used LZ4 HC instead.

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

[caligula]

Uh LZO? Why not zstd?

[skeevy420]

Uh LZO? Why not zstd?

LZ4 is a better fire and forget compressor than Zstd. If all you're looking for is good speed and compression ratios without any BS, LZ4. Zstd can be better but it requires fine tuning it and running with non-default settings.

I assume that LZO was picked for the same no-fuss reason, just by someone that didn't know any better.

[Jumbotron]

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.

[continuum]

This is a welcome development. A reason I abandoned snaps was the startup time, which I found annoying. Flatpaks and native always started much faster. I will definitely have to look at snaps again once this change is rolled out.

[CochainComplex]

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.

fear your feelings are still compressed get something faster... LZ4?

Honestly Phoronix is a geek forum - do you really expect we are discussing about the colours of the window?

I was aslo wonderign why LZO? It has been the generic for the Kernel but most fine tuned performance kernels are replacing it for good with LZ4.
LZ4 can be considered as good practice for initramfs and swap. Why not also for snap?

e.g.https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...4-Kernel-Image

Instead of bitching around - teach us why canonical decided in its wisdom to use lzo instead of higher performance compression algorithms?
Maybe this will make us look stupid. At the moment your comment makes only you look stupid.

[oibaf]

About the used compression wikipedia says about Squashfs, which is used inside snaps:

The original version of Squashfs used gzip compression, although Linux kernel 2.6.34 added support for LZMA^[11] and LZO compression,^[12] Linux kernel 2.6.38 added support for LZMA2 compression (which is used by xz),^[13] and Linux kernel 3.19 added support for LZ4 compression.^[14] Support for Zstandard was added in Linux Kernel 4.14.^[15]

So, using lz4 or zstd would have needed a newer kernel.