Is xz less resource intensive then bzip2? My testing (admittedly two years ago or so) showed significant differences, better compression ratio with xz but significantly longer and/or more memory used.

In the tests I did (including compression of an entire filesystem image), xz always compresses better for the same effort (amount of time).

One example (using the standard tools, not the multithreaded ones):

  igorhvr:tmp/ $ ls -la co_2011-08_import.mdb*
  -rw-r--r-- 1 igorhvr igorhvr 261832704 2011-10-11 07:19 co_2011-08_import.mdb
  igorhvr:tmp/ $ sudo time nice -n -20 bzip2 -k co_2011-08_import.mdb
  42.85user 0.14system 0:43.16elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 31968maxresident)k 112inputs+0outputs (3major+2268minor)pagefaults 0swaps
  igorhvr:tmp/ $ sudo time nice -n -20 xz -3 -k co_2011-08_import.mdb
  30.99user 0.19system 0:31.48elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 130640maxresident)k 96inputs+0outputs (2major+8389minor)pagefaults 0swaps
  igorhvr:tmp/ $ ls -la co_2011-08_import.mdb*
  -rw-r--r-- 1 igorhvr igorhvr 261832704 2011-10-11 07:19 co_2011-08_import.mdb
  -rw-r--r-- 1 igorhvr igorhvr  24020243 2011-10-11 07:19 co_2011-08_import.mdb.bz2
  -rw-r--r-- 1 igorhvr igorhvr  23949408 2011-10-11 07:19 co_2011-08_import.mdb.xz

In this case xz compressed roughly to the same size (slighly better than bzip2, actually) using only 72% of the time. This is often the case.

Interesting I may have been comparing parallel bzip2 with single threaded xz or perhaps it was just the data I was using for a test.

I'll have to look at it again, thanks!

Put two spaces before your lines of terminal output to prevent HN from munging them.

Done - thanks

Why do you think you automatically lose a case with cheap lawyers? If you are bringing a weak case against someone, then perhaps using high priced lawyers will be able to bully them into submission, but if the facts are with you, then a competent lawyer should be fine. If some are so bad that you will trivially lose, then perhaps the ABA/Bar has misrepresented their qualifications?

I don't think general PPP and GDP comparisons really make sense on the specific scale offered there. The cost of living in the Bay area and NYC are much much higher then the cost of living in say Alabama. I wouldn't be surprised if $2000 in rent went a lot farther in France (even Paris) then it does in say Manhattan or SF.

I don't think that's really irony...how is that worse then some obscure file in some obscure server somewhere? Or some obscure block of memory in some obscure cloud somewhere?

Have you ever used FreeBSD jails? I wish there was something as easy to use and flexible as that on Linux. The fact that each jail has minimal overhead and with dedupe on ZFS I can easily give every user their own "machine" while spending a lot less on hardware then a linux solution would require.

Having said that I also wish I could run FreeBSD on EC2 however I haven't put my money where my mouth is. I'm sure if you and many others wanted it badly enough you could sponsor development to fix any current issues. Also it would probably help if someone made a large business case to Amazon to ensure that things were targeted towards FreeBSD that would help too. (i.e. not needing an ext2 filesystem for the user provided kernel on micro instances, etc)

Absolute goodness of jails and the simplicity of making a small bootable readonly CDROM image made FreeBSD a clear winner for me in the late 1990's & early 2000's. In the 2010's... the world moves forward, now it's about having a standard virtual image.

Why?

How does OpenVZ or Linux Containers stack up to BSD's jails ?

The idea is very similar: you create a set of jails that behave as independent systems. Then every process started from a jail is tagged with a jail ID corresponding to the jail that the process was started from. All processes run in the same kernel and the jail ID gives the kernel just enough information to tell whether or not a process should have access to a given resource when sys calls are made.

I've never used OpenVZ so I don't know how they compare in practice but I can say that FreeBSD jails worked beautifully when I was using them heavily (about 2 years ago). They are super easy to manage and were as stable as you'd expect in FreeBSD (you'd have to be trying really hard to knock them down).