Compression: BigByte

[alecjw]

I made a 1GB file with BigByte and compressed it. The file size when compressed was about 70KB. I'm guessing that that's because BigByte creates files which are just 11111111111111111111111111111111 etc and when compressed it is stored as 8589934592 1's rather than 11111111111111111111111111etc. Maybe you could make it make files which are 10101010101010etc or maybe even randomly generated to stop such decrese in file size when compressed.

[LuckMan212]

why would you compress it?

[alecjw]

Good point. I just compressed it and thought that it didn't seem right. But thinking about it, I suppose wouldn't need to compress it...

[LuckMan212]

i suppose there might be a valid reason for wanting to compress the files... one example might be to test the effectiveness/compare the different compression formats (ZIP, RAR, ACE, LZH, etc).  With all 1's this is not really possible.  With a string of random characters it would be a more accurate measurement of real world performance.

[mouser]

having the program have an option to generate random bytes would be nice.

[alecjw]

Yay! Thats my first idea which hadn't been thought of 10 years before i thought of it.

[skrommel]

I've pretty much given up on BigByte after I tried a program that could make a TerraByte file in seconds! I think it just made an entry in the FAT. But I can't remember where I found it...

Adding random content is impossible the way BigByte operates. It makes a 1 byte file and makes double sized copies until the desired size is reached, merges the needed copies and removes the rest.

Skrommel

[db90h]

With all 1's this is not really possible.  With a string of random characters it would be a more accurate measurement of real world performance.

Actually, neither would represent real-world performance. Real-world benchmarking would require compilation of various common file formats. Compression targeted towards a specific file format(s) does much better than an algorithm not targeted for them. Therefore, if you were to do tests on pseudo-random or arbitrary data, the best performing compression algorithm would not necessarily be the best performing algorithm on real-world data sets.