gzip is only a happy medium if your other candidates are 7z (LZMA) or bzip2, which are both stronger but slower compressors. bzip2 is essentially obsolete (off

gzip is only a happy medium if your other candidates are 7z (LZMA) or bzip2, which are both stronger but slower compressors. bzip2 is essentially obsolete (off the pareto frontier), and LZMA is good but slow so will only be best if your transmission speed is low. Near the space/time tradeoff point that gzip lives, however, it is thoroughly outclassed by more modern compressors such as zstd or brotli with the appropriate settings.