Comparing efficiency and size of compressors

With samfs- and archive dumps being rather large, we needed a good compression scheme for these. We use a 101GB (103334MByte) large file and compress it with gzip, gzip -9, pbzip2, xz and 7z/xz:

Tool	resulting size [MByte]	down to	time needed[min]	avg. speed [MByte/s]
pbzip2 -p4	4576	4.4%	69	25.0
gzip	6160	6.0%	28	61.5
gzip -9	5805	5.6%	53	32.5
7z/xz	4246	4.1%	97	17.8
7z/xz -mx9	3998	3.9%	199	8.7
xz	3971	3.8%	884	1.9

-- CarstenAulbert - 19 Feb 2014