Compressed file support

General Discussion
1

In Avo1, we had support for reading gzip-compressed files (e.g., benzene.cube.gz or methane.fchk.gz).

While that’s fairly easy, I’m curious if people are using other kinds of compression for large files (e.g., reading bzip2 or xz-compressed files).

What kinds of compression (if any) do you use?

  • I don’t use compressed files
  • Gzip-compressed (e.g., file.pdb.gz)
  • Bzip2-compressed (e.g., file.pdb.bz2)
  • Xz-compressed (e.g., file.pdb.xz)
  • Other compression format (please mention below)
0 voters
2

I bring this up again because in generating some test files, a CJSON with a surface (for caffeine):

  • base file (no surface) = 4 KB
  • uncompressed with VdW surface = 40 MB
  • gzip-compressed VdW surface = 146 KB

No, that’s not a typo. So I’m wondering if we should be auto-compressing files with surfaces / orbitals or lots of coordinate sets.