Why do people use gzip more often than bzip? There must be some benefit but I don’t really see it, you can split and join two bzipped files (presumably CSV so you can see the extra rows). Bzip seems to compress better than gzip too.
What it comes down to is, if you care about compression time, gzip is the winner; if you care about compression ratio, then go with xz; if you care about tuning compression time/compression ratio, go with zstd. bzip2 just isn't compelling in either metric anymore.
In my experience zstd is considerably faster than gzip for compression and decompression, especially considering zstd can utilize all cores.
gzip is inferior to zstd in practically every way, no contest.
But in many cases, we unfortunately can't (gzip/Deflate is baked into tons of non-updateable hardware devices for example).
Not at all. Lots of benchmarks show zstd being almost one order of magnitude faster, before even touching the tuning.
Different machines and different content will change the results, as will the optimization work that's gone into these libraries since someone made that chart in 2021.
We use xz/lzma when we need a compressed format that you can seek through the compressed data.
It does achieve higher compression ratios on many inputs than gzip, but xz and zstd are even better, and run faster.
Bzip is pretty completely obsolete though. Especially because of how ungodly slow it is to decompress.
Yep. But bzip2 is much less flexible; reducing its block size from the default of 900 kB just reduces its compression ratio. It doesn't make it substantially faster; the algorithm it uses is always slow (both to compress and decompress). There's no reason to use it when zstd is available.
I was mostly saying zstd is not just comparable to xz (as a slow but high-compression ratio format), it’s also more than competitive with gzip, if it’s available the default configuration (level 3) will very likely compress faster and use less CPU and yield a smaller file size than gzip, though I’m pretty sure it uses more memory to do that (because of the larger window if nothing else).
* MacOS Sonoma(14.6) has tar --auto-compress and --zstd
* OpenBSD tar does not appear to have it: https://man.openbsd.org/tar
* FreeBSD does: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar
bzip2 is too slow.
xz is too complex (see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1068024 ), designed to compress .exe files.
lzip is good, but less popular.
zstd is good and fast, but less popular.
Zstd is awesome, but has only been around for a decade, but seems to be growing.