[OSM-talk] Why bz2?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 11/23/10 12:59, 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.

Osmosis or pbf2osm are the obvious choices. You'll reap even greater 
benefits if you're using software that reads pbf directly, e.g. 
osm2pgsql. as you'll save xml parsing time.

> 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 ;)

You might save time decompressing bzip2 if you use the 7zip program 
(which has a multithreading bz2 implementation).

Bye
Frederik