I saw this on the front page of the programming section of reddit
tonight.  Thought it fit with the conversation.  Seems someone
benchmarked the 3 algorithms being discussed.

http://blogs.reucon.com/srt/2008/02/18/compression_gzip_vs_bzip2_vs_7_zip.html

On Feb 18, 2008 7:50 PM, Marc Heiler <shevegen / linuxmail.org> wrote:
> Personally I am using mostly .tar.bz2 these days, simply because it
> compresses better than gz, even though gz is faster and nicer to your
> CPU. I have around 15 GIG of archivable material, if I would move this
> to gz I assume I would come to around 18 GIG, and when transferring on
> USB (via a ruby script automatically) every byte that is not transferred
> matters - some computers only have USB 1.1 and transfer is boringly slow
> already. But its mostly archival reasons here. :)
>
> PS: There recently was a comment about 7zip compressing even better than
> bzip.
> Just unfortunately, 7zip is hardly known and I will stick to bzip for
> now since its much more supported, known and also easy to handle (and
> doesnt look as attached to company-development as is 7zip)
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>