Many years ago I had to do a bunch of sorting and merging datasets on some underpowered hardware. I found that I got significant speedups by compressing my data during mergesorts because I was able to squeeze extra passes in RAM before data had to hit disk. (To be clear, I was writing to and from files, but found the data still in cache when I went to read it again.) If compression/decompression were an order of magnitude faster, the win could have been even bigger and more obvious.
Don't think of this as, "We can cheaply compress large amounts of data to save space." Think of this as, "We can compress/decompress stuff on the fly just because it is convenient for us." For the latter kind of usage the efficiency is an enabler, and the fact that the compression is supposed to be temporary makes interacting with other things a complete non-issue.
Don't think of this as, "We can cheaply compress large amounts of data to save space." Think of this as, "We can compress/decompress stuff on the fly just because it is convenient for us." For the latter kind of usage the efficiency is an enabler, and the fact that the compression is supposed to be temporary makes interacting with other things a complete non-issue.