GNU Linux bash – maximum best compression for binary data – xz (LZMA) vs zstd vs 7zip (7z) vs (parallel multi threaded multi core) bzip2 – why it is better to have A LOT of swap space (RAM 3x or 4x)

Use a slower variant of the selected compression preset level (-0 … -9) to hopefully get a little bit better compression ratio,

but with bad luck this can also make it worse. Decompressor memory usage is not affected, but compressor memory usage increases a little at preset levels -0 … -3.

Since there are two presets with dictionary sizes 4 MiB and 8 MiB, the presets -3e and -5e use slightly faster settings (lower CompCPU) than -4e and -6e, respectively.

For example, there are a total of four presets that use 8 MiB dictionary, whose order from the fastest to the slowest is -5, -6, -5e, and -6e.

while zstd won in terms of “maximum compression” it was super impressive how fast bzip2 accomplished the compression 😀

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