Gzip is old but still good. It’s not as good as Zstd nor cases where lz4 and ilk shine, but it’s not fair to claim its slow.
Gzip is quite close to the Pareto frontier, meaning it is a good trade off of time and space. See the charts at http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html (And read up on the Hutter Prize!)
"gzip vs bzip2 vs xz performace comparison" is like comparing which centenarian can limp faster, it might be entertaining for some people, but is generally not relevant.
> gzip is fast relative to other compression algorithms
gzip looks fast perhaps compared to "xz -9", but not to anything modern.
really? what do you suggest that is faster? Our shop has tested a number of compression formats (xv, bz2, gzip, etc) and gzip is good enough and faster than the others we tested.
Typical gzip decompression speed is somewhere in the 200-250 MB/s region, compression is much slower. LZ4 for example tends to compress at ~600-700 MB/s, and decompress at several GB/s. zstd is tweakable over a very wide range of ratio-speed trade-offs.
LZMA(2) (xz) is a rather troubled format and should not be used any more. bzip2 has always been slower than gzip with usually marginally better compression. It has been irrelevant for a long time.
> LZMA(2) (xv) is a rather troubled format and should not be used any more.
You mean xz. Not sure where you got the idea that it’s a troubled format, but if you’re talking about the infamous “Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving”, IMO that’s just bzip2 authors taking a dump on xz for no good reason, and fortunately for us it’s bzip2 that’s basically irrelevant today, not xz.
Well yah, those are all ratio-tuned codecs that are very slow. LZMA beats bzip2 on both ratio and speed so you might as well forget about bzip2 forever. Zstd, snappy, LZ4, or even brotli are probably better choices than zlib for most people. Brotli has LZMA-like ratios at dramatically higher speeds.
