164.gzip
SPEC CPU2000 Benchmark Description File
Benchmark Name
164.gzip
Benchmark Author
Jean-Loup Gailly <gzip@gnu.org>
Benchmark Program General Category
compression
Benchmark Description
gzip (GNU zip) is a popular data compression program written by Jean-Loup
Gailly <gzip@gnu.org> for the GNU project. `gzip' uses Lempel-Ziv
coding (LZ77) as its compression algorithm.
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.
Input Description
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.
Output Description
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.
Programming Language
ANSI C
Known portability issues
The header file "io.c" is not automatically included. If your
compiler needs this header file, define NEED_IO_H.
References
Last updated: 5 October 1999
