Linux compressors comparison on CentOS 6.5 x86-64: lzo vs lz4 vs gzip vs bzip2 vs lzma

Compressing the linux kernel 3.14.1 sources

Sources are text files, and text files generally have very good compression ratios. Let see how our contenders fare in compressing the linux kernel 3.14.1 source tar file:

While the relative standing remains the same, we can see two differences:

1. as expected, the compression ratio is somewhat higher
2. lzop is considerably faster at compression compared to the previous run.

Now, the multi-threaded part:

and scaling:

Compression scaling remain excellent, with pxz in the last place.