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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

"Only slightly faster in decompression time."

m5 vs -19 is nearly 2.5x faster to decompress; given that most data is decompressed many many more times (often thousands or millions of times more, often by devices running on small batteries) than it is compressed, that's an enormous win, not "only slightly faster".

The way in which it might not be worth it is the larger size, which is a real drawback.

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The difference is barely noticeable in real-world cases, in terms of performance or battery. Decoding images is a small part of loading an entire webpage from the internet. And transferring data isn't free either, so any benefits need to be offset against the larger file size and increased network usage.

When you talk about images over HTTP, you need to consider most web servers and browsers already support zstd compression on the transport, so the potential bandwidth win provided by zstd is already being made use of today.

I'm not sure how that's relevant for a new "ZPNG" format vs. lossless WebP?

you have to do the math - do you have more bandwidth or storage or cpu?

Not related to images, but I remember compressing packages of executables and zstd was a clear winner over other compression standards.

Some compression algorithms can run in parallel, and on a system with lots of cpus it can be a big factor.

Win how?

More efficiency will inevitably only lead to increased usage of the CPU and in turn batteries draining faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

So someone is going to load 2.5x as many images because it can be decoded 2.5x faster? The paradox isn't a law of physics, it's an interesting observation about markets. (If this was a joke it was too subtle for me)

Might as well just shoot yourself if that's how you look at improvements. The only way to do something good it to stop existing. (this is a general statement, not aimed at you or anyone in particular)

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