03-14-2024, 11:39 AM
Although I agree benchmarking is the way to go, we can estimate. Suppose it's a 52× CD-ROM drive. Faster drives are, as far as I know, rare. That's 150 KB/s × 52 ≈ 7.6 MB/s. lz4 and Zstandard should not be a problem with this data rate, which leaves XZ. A 7-Zip issue from 2007 has a user reporting LZMA decompression at 9 MB/s in single-thread mode on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. On one hand, GCC is better now than it was in 2007 and should generate somewhat more efficient code. LZMA decompressors may be more optimized, too. On the other hand, a machine booting from a CD-ROM is not going to be able to devote all of its resources to decompression. If we assume a 10 MB/s decompression rate, a single core, and half of the CPU time going to decompression, we get 5 MB/s. So I'd guess that the faster Pentium 4 CPUs may bottleneck XZ decompression off a fast CD-ROM, but not too badly. Core 2 Duo CPUs shouldn't bottleneck it at all.