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people tend to care about decompression speed - xz can be quite slow decompressing super compressed files whereas zstd decompression speed is largely independent of that.

People also tend to care about how much time they spend on compression for each incremental % of compression performance and zstd tends to be a Pareto frontier for that (at least for open source algorithms)

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This makes sense. A lot of end-users have internet speeds that can outpace the decompression speeds of heavily compressed files. Seems like there would be an irrational psychological aspect to it as well.

Unfortunately for the hoster, they either have to eat the cost of the added bandwidth from a larger file or have people complain about slow decompression.

Well the difference is quite a bit more manageable in practice since you’re talking about single digit space difference vs a 2-100x performance in decompression.

I definitely agree, I basically have unlimited time and unlimited CPU for decompressing. Available memory is huge too. The gains from xz were significant enough that I went with it.

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