That doesn't seem to be the case. A relatively fast machine can't gzip anywhere near 120 MB/s unless the data ultra compressible. Zstd is multithreaded, but sin

That doesn't seem to be the case. A relatively fast machine can't gzip anywhere near 120 MB/s unless the data ultra compressible. Zstd is multithreaded, but single threaded it's speed isn't that fast either. $ lscpu | grep name Model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6154 CPU @ 3.00GHz $ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=10240 count=102400 102400+0 records in 102400+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.145168 s, 7.2 GB/s real 0m0.147s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.111s $ time dd if=/dev/zero bs=10240 count=102400 | gzip > /dev/null 102400+0 records in 102400+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 5.36061 s, 196 MB/s real 0m5.364s user 0m5.317s sys 0m0.472s $ time dd if=/dev/urandom bs=10240 count=102400 | gzip > /dev/null 102400+0 records in 102400+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 27.3478 s, 38.3 MB/s real 0m27.352s user 0m27.169s sys 0m10.119s $ time dd if=biggestwords bs=10240 count=102400 | gzip > /dev/null 10642+1 records in 10642+1 records out 108981378 bytes (109 MB) copied, 6.66068 s, 16.4 MB/s real 0m6.669s user 0m6.667s sys 0m0.249s $ time dd if=biggestwords bs=10240 count=102400 | gzip -1 > /dev/null 10642+1 records in 10642+1 records out 108981378 bytes (109 MB) copied, 1.53539 s, 71.0 MB/s real 0m1.540s user 0m1.522s sys 0m0.138s $ time dd if=biggestwords of=/dev/null bs=10240 count=102400 10642+1 records in 10642+1 records out 108981378 bytes (109 MB) copied, 0.0407698 s, 2.7 GB/s real 0m0.043s user 0m0.007s sys 0m0.036s Biggestwords is simply /usr/share/dict/words concatenated to itself 22 times so as to provide ~100 MB of data. If you can get good enough compression it might still be worthwhile to compress. But it's pretty rare in my experience.