I was just wondering what could be the impact if, say, Microsoft decided to automaticly "lossless" compress every single file saved in a computer.
What are the pros? The cons? Is it feasible?
I was just wondering what could be the impact if, say, Microsoft decided to automaticly "lossless" compress every single file saved in a computer.
What are the pros? The cons? Is it feasible?
Speed.
When compressing a file of any kind you're encoding its contents in a more compact form, often using dictionaries and/or prefix codes (An example: huffman coding). To access the data you have to uncompress it, and this translates to time and used memory, as to access a specific piece of the file you have to decompress it as a whole. While decompressing you ave to save the results somewhere and the most appropriate place is RAM. Of course this wouldn't be a great problem (decompressing the whole file) if all of it needed to be read, and not even in the case of a stream reading it, but if a program wanted to write to the compressed file all the data would have to be compressed again, or at least a part of it.
As you can see, compressing files in the filesystem would reduce a lot the bandwidth available to applications - to read a single byte you have to read a chunk of the file and decompress it - and also require more RAM.