164.gzip
Jean-Loup Gailly <gzip@gnu.org>
compression
gzip (GNU zip) is a popular data compression program written by Jean-Loup
Gailly
SPEC's version of gzip performs no file I/O other than reading the input. All compression and decompression happens entirely in memory. This is to help isolate the work done to just the CPU and the memory subsystem.
164.gzip's reference workload has five components: a large TIFF image, a webserver log, a program binary, random data, and a source tar file. With the exception of the random data, these components were selected as a reasonably representative set of things that gzip might be most often used on. The random data is present to test gzip's worst-case behavior.
Each input set is compressed and decompressed at several different blocking factors ("compression levels"), with the end result of the process being compared to the original data after each step.
The output files provide a brief outline of what the benchmark is doing as it runs. Output sizes for each compression and decompression are printed to facilitate validation, and the results of decompression are compared with the input data to ensure that they match.
ANSI C
None