This is the story of a guy with a clean house because create_compressed_fs takes so long to run for each test boot, he got bored and did house work instead of watching TV. His girlfriend now loves him and his mother is worried.

I am remastering KNOPPIX V3.6. My dev O.S. is the V3.6 HD install multiuser with HW autodetect. I have used two different computers: a Dell L400 laptop with 733mhz cpu, 256mb ram and 20gig ide HD in three partitions, and a Dell GX300 desktop with dual 733mhz cpu's, 512mb ram and two fast scsi drives in four partitions where the remaster is on a partition on the faster drive and the CD boot partition is on the other drive.

I don't seem to get any additional benefit from with the GX300 except when I run other tasks during a compress I don't get any mouse pointer delays or programs taking 30 seconds to startup like on the L400. The GX300 never uses both cpu's at the same time but switches between them sharing the load. I get the same behavior on MS w2k3 svr. The additional ram and fast scsi drives didn't help much. This seems to be limited by cpu speed. That, or the racing stripes I painted on the L400 really do make a difference in performance.

L400 w/o the -b option takes about 35 minutes to compress the full KNOPPIX distribution.

GX300 w/o the -b option takes about 35 minutes to compress the full KNOPPIX distribution.

GX300 with the -b option takes about 5 hours to compress the full KNOPPIX distribution.

A compression without the -b option resulted in an iso size of 763000832. With the -b option the size is 742182912 for a savings of only 21mb. Doesn't hardly seem worth it unless you are so close to fitting your remaster on your media of choice and need to get that size just a little bit smaller and you can't take away any more packages.

So, what's in YOUR computer?

Steve