/ 
Gzip-Faster-0.06
River stage one • 7 direct dependents • 9 total dependents
/ Gzip::Faster

NAME

Gzip::Faster - gzip and gunzip, without the fuss

SYNOPSIS

use Gzip::Faster;
my $gzipped = gzip ($input);
my $roundtrip = gunzip ($gzipped);
# $roundtrip is the same as $input

DESCRIPTION

This module compresses to and decompresses from the gzip format.

FUNCTIONS

gzip

my $zipped = gzip ($stuff);

This compresses $stuff into the gzip format. The return value is the compressed version of $stuff.

gunzip

my $stuff = gunzip ($zipped);

This uncompresses $zipped and returns the result of the uncompression. It returns the undefined value if $zipped is the undefined value or an empty string. Otherwise, it throws a fatal error if $zipped is not in the gzip format. =head2 gzip_file

gzip_file

my $zipped = gzip_file ('file');

This reads the contents of file into memory and then runs "gzip" on the file's contents. The return value and the possible errors are the same as "gzip", plus this may also throw an error if open fails.

gunzip_file

my $stuff = gunzip_file ('file.gz');

This reads the contents of file.gz into memory and then runs "gunzip" on the file's contents. The return value and the possible errors are the same as "gunzip", plus this may also throw an error if open fails.

PERFORMANCE

This section compares the performance of Gzip::Faster with IO::Compress::Gzip and IO::Uncompress::Gunzip. According to my results, Gzip::Faster is four times faster to load, nine times faster to compress, and more than twenty times faster to uncompress. Round trips are about ten times faster with Gzip::Faster.

Here is a comparison of load times:

       Rate Load IOUG Load IOCG   Load GF
Load IOUG 25.0/s        --       -4%      -81%
Load IOCG 26.1/s        4%        --      -80%
Load GF    134/s      435%      413%        --

Here is a comparison of a round-trip:

                      Rate IO::Compress::Gzip       Gzip::Faster
IO::Compress::Gzip  1199/s                 --               -91%
Gzip::Faster       12800/s               968%                 --

Here is a comparison of gzip (compression) only:

                      Rate IO::Compress::Gzip       Gzip::Faster
IO::Compress::Gzip  2355/s                 --               -87%
Gzip::Faster       17582/s               647%                 --

Here is a comparison of gunzip (decompression) only:

                          Rate IO::Uncompress::Gunzip           Gzip::Faster
IO::Uncompress::Gunzip  2739/s                     --                   -96%
Gzip::Faster           67368/s                  2360%                     --

The test file is in "examples/benchmark.pl" in the distribution.

There is also a module called Compress::Raw::Zlib which offers access to zlib itself. It may offer improved performance, however I have not figured out what it does yet. Its documented way of making a gzip compressed object returns something I cannot understand so I was unable to include it in the benchmark.

BUGS

The module includes functionality to round-trip various Perl flags. I applied this to preserving Perl's "utf8" flag. However, the mechanism I used trips a browser bug in the Firefox web browser where it produces a content encoding error message. Thus this functionality is disabled.

AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Ben Bullock <bkb@cpan.org>. Copyright (C) 2014 Ben Bullock. This software may be used, modified, distributed under the same licence as Perl itself.