James Harper <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
Consider virtual hosting where disk size matters a bit more, because you pay for what you use. To take an example of one of my spam filtering mail relays which sees around 500MB of email a day, and on which I keep 365 days of logs, the logfiles take 380MB compressed but would take 2.3GB uncompressed. If they weren't compressed I'd have to buy more disk than the 10GB I have now.
True, but Russell's comparison was between compressing the logs with, e.g., gzip or xz, and relying on a file system such as Btrfs to perform the compression (albeit less efficiently). Thus the strength of the above example depends on the size difference between these two cases. The conclusion might still hold, of course, but this isn't obvious without some assumptions and calculations.