A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `software`

¶ Tracking LZMA efficiency

I’m a big fan of 7-Zip. It isn’t the best-looking application ever written, but that could be because its creator, Igor Pavlov, is concerned much more with its compression methods than its interface. 7-Zip has its own container format, but more important is the LZMA compression algorithm that Igor wrote and put into the public domain.

I decided to do some quick and dirty benchmarks to track the progress of LZMA/7-Zip over time. I went back as far as Igor supplied binaries, including one from the very old 3.x series. Rather than test every single release between then and now, I used only “stable” releases, with the exception of version 4.65, which is the latest version of any sort, as well as 4.66, which uses an alpha version of Igor’s new LZMA2 codec (and, as you’ll see, provides definite performance improvement).

I used Igor’s Timer utility to time the process (global time was reported). The corpus in this case was the Linux kernel source, v2.6.28. I conducted these tests on a RAM disk to eliminate hard disk latency issues (especially for decompressions, which improved by about 25% from my initial HDD-based tests). My rig is a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 [2.4Ghz], with 4GB of RAM (one dedicated to the RAM disk), running Vista SP1 x64.

The command line setup was an approximation of the 7-Zip GUI’s “ultra” settings: -t7z -m0=lzma -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on, letting the archiver auto-choose the number of threads to spawn. Read more…

§3580 · February 9, 2009 · 1 comment · Tags: benchmarks, codecs, compression, Linux, open source, software

¶ FLAC compile benchmarks

FLAC is a cross-platform codec, but when it comes to Windows, one has a pretty wide range of compiles. Some are more optimized than others.

I first got the idea for this benchmark when I stumbled upon a native 64-bit FLAC executable for Windows. Curious, I did a quick and dirty test against the canonical build for Windows and found that while encoding times were similar, decoding times were considerably faster.

To figure out why this is so (the 64-bitness or something else), I quickly pulled some some additional compiles and benchmarked them against a few different samples.

¶ GNOME Audio Player Shootout Revisited

GNOME logo

It’s been close to two years since I wrote GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a visual and textual comparison of some the best available audio players for the GNOME desktop.

As is usually the case in the world of free software, a lot has happened since then (and yet, in a strange way, things have stayed exactly the same). I decided to revisit some of those players and see how they’ve progressed. Some of them listed last time haven’t seen any appreciable development, and have been left off.

I realize that I am totally ignoring the daemon-based players (read: Music Player Daemon, XMMS2); this is by design, since those players open up a whole new can of worms. Suffice it to say that if you’ve decided on and XMMS2 or MPD-based player and successfully configured it, you probably don’t need any advice on choosing software.

The following programs will be covered in this review (development versions):

BMPx (0.40.14)
Rhythmbox (0.11.6)
Exaile (2.99.1-svn)
Banshee (1.4.1)
Quod Libet (2.0)
Decibel (1.00)
Songbird (1.0)
Listen (0.6~svn1044)

All of the testing was done on a fresh install (and update) of Ubuntu 8.10 in VirtualBox, using a small representative sample of my music collection (some modern, some classical, in Vorbis, MP3, and FLAC).

§2709 · December 19, 2008 · 4 comments · Tags: audio, codecs, Firefox, FLAC, GNOME, Linux, open source, software

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¶ Now Reading for WordPress 2.7

This page has been moved to a more permanent spot. Please go there.

§3432 · December 15, 2008 · 61 comments · Tags: software, Wordpress

¶ In defense of open models

Andrew Keen has no idea how open models work.

In his latest article, he pontificates that the recent economic downturn is a death knell for community-supported or community-built programs/sites/&c.

So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc., Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

There are really two broad fallacies that need addressing here. The first is Keen’s use of the word “open source,” which here is a misnomer. He never mentions Linux, Apache, or other open source programs which always have and will continue to have a dedicated base of programmers, most of whom work on it in their spare time, without any remuneration except personal pride and the esteem of their peers. It need hardly be noted that an economic downtown is likely to increase interest in open-source software, as it likely reduces operating costs for businesses.