Re: [GD-General] Re: asset & document management

[Neil S. <ne...@r0...>]

>   While P4 doesn't do binary diffs, they do support compression (gzip),
> which works reasonably well on most data (exception: hauge WAV files).

Good point. I was forgetting about that.

Although, it's not much consolation when you make a 20 byte change to a 20
meg file and it has to use another 10 megs of disk space. One solution is to
try and avoid having monolithic file formats so no single file is going to
waste large chunks of space for every check-in, but you can't do much about
formats that you don't create yourself.

>   It would be nice if they supported some sort of xdelta-like diff storage
> instead, but it seems like it's not a massive issue nowadays when huge
> drives are cheap.

I asked Perforce about this a while ago (when we first started using it, in
fact) and IIRC they said that although storing binary deltas would save disk
space, it would hurt performance quite badly, as they would have to
construct enormous files from lots of tiny changes. They went for the
performance option, which is fair enough.

One idea I had was to use deltas but, in a manner similar to video files
(like mpeg), store complete images every now and then, reducing the maximum
reconstruction to some - possibly user-specified - amount. I don't know if
we'll ever see this though, certainly not if storage costs keep going the
way they are.

- Neil.