Java Performance Tuning

Compression

A colleague of mine once installed a compression utility on his desktop machine that compressed the entire disk. The utility worked as a type of disk driver: accesses to the disk went through the utility, and every read and write was decompressed or compressed transparently to the rest of the system, and to the user. My colleague was expecting the system to run slower, but needed the extra disk space and was willing to put up with a slower system.

What he actually found was that his system ran faster! It turned out that the major bottleneck to his system was disk throughput, and by making most files smaller (averaging half the previous size), everything was moving between memory and disk much quicker. The CPU had plenty of spare cycles necessary to handle the compression-decompression procedures because it was waiting for disk transfers to complete.

This illustrates how the overhead of compression can be outweighed by the benefits of reducing I/O. The system described obviously had a disk that was relatively too slow in comparison to the CPU processing power. But this is quite common. Disk throughput has not improved nearly as fast as CPUs have increased in speed, and this divergent trend is set to continue for some time. The same is true for networks. Although networks do tend to have a huge jump in throughput with each generation, this jump tends to be offset by the much larger volumes of data being transferred. Furthermore, network-mounted disks are also increasingly ...