Canonical's Snap Packaging Switching To LZO Compression For Faster Startup Times
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LZO offers less compression abilities than XZ but has the benefit of being less taxing during decompression and thus faster. The Chromium browser Snap package, for example, is ~150MB with XZ compression but increases to ~250MB with the LZO packaged version.
Testing on various systems they found using LZO could lead to 40~74% faster cold start-ups for Snaps over XZ, the LZO-compressed Snap of Chromium started up in nearly the same time as a Kubuntu 18.04 system with the Chromium DEB package, and LZO-compressed start-ups on Fedora could be faster than a comparable RPM package.
More details via the Ubuntu blog on their Snap plans around LZO. Slow initial start-up times of Snap applications have been one of the common complaints about Snaps so at least this should address that albeit with greater storage requirements.
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