Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
It's very very possible with text. I won't pretend to know anything about the algorithms used in detail, but if you google huffman encoding, that's one of the ways they can compress so heavily.
The numbers I used are real. I made a fresh copy of my apache log, 5.8MB in size (yes I rounded to 6MB in my OP  . After gzip -9 compression, 180KB gzip'd, or if bzip2'd instead 121KB. |
That implies massive redundancy, as I said in my previous post. If you compress a typical piece of "real world" text (eg a book) you'll typically get a factor of 2 or 3 from it in the way of compression.