On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 6:33 AM, roberto.minelli@usi.ch <roberto.minelli@usi.ch> wrote:
Hi,

Following the Fuel test FLUserGuidesTest>>#testGZip I discovered that I can serialize and materialize to and from GZip archives. Cool!

I tried with some small test object and it worked like a charm. When I tried with a large object���


Yes, I have the exact same problem long ago. As far as I could debug at that point in time, it was a bug in the compression plugin in the VM.
So there isn't anything easy you can do about. ��See��http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2011-December/056419.html ��for more details.
��
Serialization
- It does not work, the image instantly crashes

Materialization
- Since I was not able to serialize the large object on GZip, I serialized "normally" than compressed the resulting fuel file using GZipWriteStream class>>#compressFile:
- When I materialize from the GZip archive, it takes forever and does not succeed after more than 1 minute. Note that the same non-Gzipped file takes a couple of seconds to be materialized.


If you serialized normally and the compressed, then to materialize you need to first uncompress and then give fuel the decompressed version.��

BTW...what I did for Fuel and compressing is a Pharo binding to a really fast compressor/uncompressor: LZ4.

http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~marianopeck/LZ4

That is very fast, but it doesn't provide a streaming API. So the usage I did was:

- Fuel serialize in memory to a bytearray
- LZ4 compress that bytearray and write compressed to file or whatever you want
- LZ4 uncompress from file or from where you stored the compressed version.��
- Fuel materialize from the compressed stream from previous step

this will work even for very large graphs.��

There is also an experiment Max and I were doing about compressing strings right inside Fuel:

https://code.google.com/p/fuel/issues/detail?id=160

But this is committed in the experiments repo. If you want to take a look...

Best,��

--
Mariano
http://marianopeck.wordpress.com