Performance affects of compressing Program Files on Windows / NTFS

Posted by SRobertJames on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by SRobertJames
Published on 2011-01-03T03:04:56Z Indexed on 2011/01/03 3:55 UTC
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Filed under:

Windows

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Performance

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ntfs

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compression

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virtual-memory

What are the performance affects of compressing Program Files on Windows NTFS?

On a fast, multicore machine, the overhead of decompression is minimal. Machines are generally disk bound, and if you can reduce the disk load by compression, you often speed things up. (Microsoft says that the built in compression of Windows Search indexes actually improves speed for this reason.)

On the other hand, Windows' virtual memory is complicated. Perhaps if files are compressed, they can't be paged out simply. And there may be other issues.

In short: On a fast, multicore machine with a relatively slow disk, what performance affects will compressing Program Files have?

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