From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:04:34 GMT
Subject: Re: Why SHA are 40 bytes? (aka looking for flames)
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0704241058490.12375@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <462E18C8.4070001@op5.se>

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> Using a more efficient compression algorithm for the objects 
> themselves (bzip2, anyone?) will most likely reduce storage size an 
> order of magnitude more than reducing the size of the hash, although 
> at the expense of CPU-efficiency.

An order of magnitude I really doubt it.  Maybe 20% could be a really 
optimistic prediction.  But if bzip2 could reduce the repo by 20%, it 
will slow runtime usage of that repo by maybe 100%.  That is not worth 
it.

This is also the reason why we changed the default zlib compression 
level from "best" to "default".


Nicolas