Matt Mahoney has a neat page compiling text-compression benchmarks: http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html https://news.ycomb

Matt Mahoney has a neat page compiling text-compression benchmarks: http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6001489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6001489 It's linked in the OP but easy to overlook. Here's how the prize winner compares with generic tools on en-wiki text (from Mahoney's page): Compression Ratio (in/out) Time (ns/byte) decomp8 6.27 324,000 xz -9 -e 4.72 2,482 bzip2 -9 3.94 379 gzip -9 3.10 101