I love it. So much in computers is trade offs and this was a fun read exploring it.
It would be interesting to see some economics of what 8,000% increase in encoding time takes to make that money back in terms of storage or bandwidth. I also wonder how brotli/lzma would compare here. Are there some obscene modes on those that had similar results?
Far better, just like anything else based on arithmetic coding. The main distinction here is that the output can still be decompressed with a standard Inflate implementation.
zstd has higher level modes. Default is -3. I saw a good tradeoff between compression speed and ratio up to -9 or so. From -20 to -22 it will use much more memory and IIRC can have downstream effects on decompression speed. I'm using -9 for my container registry and plan to recompress at a higher level for commonly accessed base layers, as well as give customers a button that lets them pay a bit more to do it themselves.
To be a little pedantic, the usual zstd levels are positive integers (1-22 default 3). The negative integers denote "fast" modes with worse compression (there are only a few of these).
It would be interesting to see some economics of what 8,000% increase in encoding time takes to make that money back in terms of storage or bandwidth. I also wonder how brotli/lzma would compare here. Are there some obscene modes on those that had similar results?
Far better, just like anything else based on arithmetic coding. The main distinction here is that the output can still be decompressed with a standard Inflate implementation.