[colechristensen]

I'm not sure about the fastest macbook disk access, but even with NVMe storage I've found lz4 to be faster than the disk. That is (it's hard to say this exactly correct) compressed content gets read/written FASTER than uncompressed content because fewer bytes need to transit the disk interface and the CPU is able to compress/decompress significantly faster than data is able to go through whatever disk bus you've got.

[fpoling]

On my 2 years old ThinkPad laptop SSD is faster than lz4. On a fat EC2 server lz4 is faster. So one really has to test a particular config.

[colechristensen]

Yeah, I'm not surprised the PCIe 5.0 transfer speeds matched with top tier SSD chips win that race.

It still bothers me that the fastest most performant computer I have access to is almost always my laptop, and that by a considerable margin.

Someone should do some lz4 vs. ssd benchmarks across hardware to make my argument more solid and the boundaries clear.

[UltraSane]

You can get AWS instances with very fast local NVMe drives.

[colechristensen]

If you have many cores and have the right optimizations in place the bottleneck for lz4 decompression is RAM throughput which is always going to beat whatever fancy disk setup you have.

But yes on the extreme end absolutely there's a point where lz4 stops making sense, but also most of us aren't trying to max out a 128 core postgres server or whatever.