Size matters.

Total size of Debian GNU/Linux on i386

That's stable, testing, sid, and experimental as of 15 December 2005.

Compression Total size in MB Save in MB Avg. binary pkg size in MB Save in % Compr. MB/s Uncompr. MB/s Comments
none 39926 -26440 1.491 -185.1 - -
lzop ? ? ? ? 8.254 19.231
gzip 13700 0 0.512 0 4.032 14.925
bzip2 11938 1590 0.446 11.1 0.660 1.980
rzip 10937 2550 0.409 18.4 0.601 8.467
7zip * 9344 4189 0.349 29.3 0.379 2.597
lzma 11549 3824 0.571 24.9 ? ? Update lzma 4.43-7 on sid i386/all on 14 May 2007 (20217 packages)
* Done using version 4.30 in Debian. According to the changelog 4.31 has speed optimizations, so this test should be run again with 4.31+.

Interesting numbers

Approximately 9 binary CDs instead of 13 per arch.
The same gain can be won with 7z on source packages.
26770 binary packages.
Some words about timing.

The format of the logs is package mb_as_gz mb_as_othercompression.

Advantages

more space for software on d-i
more space for other archs without the need to create more space on mirrors
less network traffic
less CD and DVD images

Disadvantages

dpkg needs be patched to support p7zip (one time effort)
Update: Debians' dpkg supports bzip2 compressed archives since 12 Jun 2005 (1.13.9), and lzma since 2 Jan 2007 (1.13.25). As of 8 May 2007 (1.14.0) Debian packages can be built with lzma compression, add -- -Zlzma to debian/rules dh_builddeb.

Scripts

You can get the scripts used to do the create the results here.
sizematters.none
sizematters.bz2
sizematters.7z
sizematters.lzma
allfiles (created by sizematters)
watchgain (watch and calculate the totals)

Links

Debian Mirror Size
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, FAQ
Debian Installer
Debian popularity contest

Contact

Alex Myczko