[OSM-talk] Why bz2?

[Shaun McDonald]

On Tue, November 23, 2010 11:59 am, Fabio Alessandro Locati wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>
> wrote:
>> We have introduced a new binary format that compresses far better than
>> even
>> xz, so if you're willing to install extra software for uncompressing
>> data,
>> go with the new pbf format. Extracts on the download.geofabrik.de site
>> are
>> already available in .osm.pbf, and sonner or later the full planet file
>> will
>> be, too.
> Awesome, but I haven't found a way to uncompress it.
>
> PS: My question raised because my 4 cores PhenomII computer has
> downloaded for more than 11 hours and is uncompressing since 4 hours
> ago the planet with full history and haven't finished yet ;)

Generally speaking you won't want to uncompress the file to disk directly.
Rather you will want to pipe the uncompressed output to another program to
do the processing. This will be a lot faster since you are reading and
writing to/from disk a lot less data and discarding any data that you
don't need.

Shaun