Of course...I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that they are decompressing many files sequentially without knowing that you can easily run gunzip in parallel us

Of course...I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that they are decompressing many files sequentially without knowing that you can easily run gunzip in parallel using tools like gnu parallel. The OP says they get to "ten gigabytes in size." It does not take 15 minutes to decompress a 10GB file on a modern workstation, as they complain in a child comment, unless you decompress multiple files sequentially. I've routinely compressed and decompressed 100GB+ files on 5 year old workstation class machines and it takes at most 5-ish minutes for one direction, (stress on "at most").