Compression Tools Compared

Data compression works so well that popular backup and networking tools have some built in. Linux offers more than a dozen compression tools to choose from, and most of them let you pick a compression level too. To find out which perform best, I benchmarked 87 combinations of tools and levels. Read this article to learn which compressor is a hundred times faster than the others and which ones compress the most.

The most popular data compression tool for Linux is gzip, which lets you choose a compression level from one to nine. One is fast, and nine compresses well. Choosing a good trade-off between speed and compression ratio becomes important when it takes hours to handle gigabytes of data. You can get a sense of what your choices are from the graph shown in Figure 1. The fastest choices are on the left, and the highest compressing ones are on the top. The best all-around performers are presented in the graph's upper left-hand corner.

Figure 1. Increasing the compression level in gzip increases both compression ratio and time required to complete.

But many other data compression tools are available to choose from in Linux. See the comprehensive compression and decompression benchmarks in Figures 2 and 3. As with gzip, the best performers are in the upper left-hand corner, but these charts' time axes are scaled logarithmically to accommodate huge differences in how fast they work.

Figure 2. Performance of Many Utilities, Compression

Figure 3. Performance of Many Utilities, Decompression

The tools that tend to compress more and faster are singled out in the graphs shown in Figures 4 and 5. Use these for backups to disk drives. Remember, their time axes are scaled logarithmically. The red lines show the top-performing ones, and the green lines show the top performers that also can act as filters.

Figure 4. Best Utilities for Backups, Compression

Figure 5. Best Utilities for Backups, Decompression