Note that there is a huge difference between compression levels in xz (LZMA), while there is almost no difference between bzip2 levels. This benchmark uses the

Note that there is a huge difference between compression levels in xz (LZMA), while there is almost no difference between bzip2 levels. This benchmark uses the slowest 9th level. If you try lower levels, e.g. xz -3, it may give better compression ratio and better compression speed than bzip2, and, being an LZ77 algorithm, much better decompression speed. Here's an example with different levels: http://pokecraft.first-world.info/wiki/Quick_Benchmark:_Gzip_vs_Bzip2_vs_LZMA_vs_XZ_vs_LZ4_vs_LZO http://pokecraft.first-world.info/wiki/Quick_Benchmark:_Gzip... Also, I recommend using parallel versions (pbzip2 or pxz) if you have more than one CPU core: compression is highly parallelizable, so if you have 2 cores, they can half the compression time.