Declaration Syntax RemarksThis property sets an upper limit on the number of memory buffer pairs to create. The implementation of this stream allocates multiple buffers to facilitate parallel compression. As each buffer fills up, this stream uses ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem() to compress those buffers in a background threadpool thread. After a buffer is compressed, it is re-ordered and written to the output stream.
A higher number of buffer pairs enables a higher degree of parallelism, which tends to increase the speed of compression on multi-cpu computers. On the other hand, a higher number of buffer pairs also implies a larger memory consumption, more active worker threads, and a higher cpu utilization for any compression. This property enables the application to limit its memory consumption and CPU utilization behavior depending on requirements.
For each compression "task" that occurs in parallel, there are 2 buffers allocated: one for input and one for output. This property sets a limit for the number of pairs. The total amount of storage space allocated for buffering will then be (N*S*2), where N is the number of buffer pairs, S is the size of each buffer (BufferSize). By default, DotNetZip allocates 4 buffer pairs per CPU core, so if your machine has 4 cores, and you retain the default buffer size of 128k, then the ParallelDeflateOutputStream will use 4 * 4 * 2 * 128kb of buffer memory in total, or 4mb, in blocks of 128kb. If you then set this property to 8, then the number will be 8 * 2 * 128kb of buffer memory, or 2mb.
CPU utilization will also go up with additional buffers, because a larger number of buffer pairs allows a larger number of background threads to compress in parallel. If you find that parallel compression is consuming too much memory or CPU, you can adjust this value downward.
The default value is 16. Different values may deliver better or worse results, depending on your priorities and the dynamic performance characteristics of your storage and compute resources.
This property is not the number of buffer pairs to use; it is an upper limit. An illustration: Suppose you have an application that uses the default value of this property (which is 16), and it runs on a machine with 2 CPU cores. In that case, DotNetZip will allocate 4 buffer pairs per CPU core, for a total of 8 pairs. The upper limit specified by this property has no effect.
The application can set this value at any time, but it is effective only before the first call to Write(), which is when the buffers are allocated.