Maximum best compression for binary data: xz (LZMA) vs. ZSTD vs. 7z vs. bzip2

dwaves.de

8 pointsmococa4 comments

For many uses decompression speed is more interesting than compression speed.

Agreed. If I’m not mistaken, Zstd offers the best decompression times at the cost of utilizing all of your cores.

Not even. Zstd offers the best decompression times using just one single core.

Multi-threading is a feature for the compression side.

Right now I tend to stick with gzip and bzip2, and rarely xz. I like the fact when I gzip/bzip2, my laptop does not heat up to a degree where I could fry an egg on it :)

Plus with the size of drives, getting 10% or so better encryption does not matter too much to me. If it saved 25% on huge files, maybe I would reconsider.

I did a comparison on a 43 gig file, here are the sizes I got.

Size and compression time comparison:

* txt: 43G n/a

* gz: 20G Compression Time 00:38:37

* bz2: 18G Compression Time 01:16:45

* xz: 18G Compression Time 12:25:42 (300M smaller than bz2)

The original 43G file was compressed via 7zip, and was about 600M smaller than the xz version.

This was done on a Thinkpad W541, my main system.

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