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

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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