[fitsbits] Rice compression from the command line

On Wed 2006/07/19 09:47:45 -0400, Arnold Rots wrote
in a message to: Mark Calabretta
and copied to: Rob Seaman ,

I did a simple test using bzip2 for event files on Solaris.
Sure, I got 15% savings over gzip and I'm not worried about the
compression taking about twice as long. But the decompression taking
an order of magnitude longer than gunzip bothers me. Even if it is
more than compensated for by what's gained in transmission time, the
users' perception will be that things are worse, since decompression

I agree that for data distribution it's the end-user experience that
counts.

However, I'm skeptical of the order of magnitude figure. The worst I
saw was x3 in elapsed time which is what a user would perceive but
typically it was between x1.5 and x2. Do you have figures for this
test similar to those I sent?

Cheers, Mark