Back-of-the-envelope cost of extra data :-)

Kevin Kenny kennykb at crd.ge.com
Mon May 9 15:26:31 UTC 2005


olsona at lecserver.nci.nih.gov said:
> One way to reduce data file growth is to store just 5 bytes of time_t
> values rather than 8.

Better still would be, in the 64-bit version, to keep all the timezones
in a single file rather than using the file system as a database.  You lose
an incredible abount of space to internal fragmentation. On my Linux
machine:

% find /usr/share/zoneinfo -type f -print | xargs cat | wc -c
 873941
% du -k -s /usr/share/zoneinfo
5136    /usr/share/zoneinfo

So there's a little over 5 megabytes of zoneinfo files (much of it
in the 'right' rules), but less than 900 kilobytes of actual data.

--
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin KENNY   GE Corporate Research & Development
kennykb at crd.ge.com           P. O. Box 8, Bldg. K-1, Rm. 5B36A
                             Schenectady, New York 12301-0008 USA




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