Benchmarking 42 Compression Formats: Real-World Results and Practical Recommendations

Short summary

The author benchmarked 42 compression formats spanning four decades against a realistic 55 MB mixed corpus, with round-trip SHA-256 verification. Key findings: 7z (LZMA2) max offers the best mainstream ratio at ~60%, tar.zst provides near-instant decompression at 61%, and ZIP remains the safest choice for cross-platform sharing. The frontier is steep then flat—past xz/7z, diminishing returns are extreme.

• •42 compression formats benchmarked on a realistic 55 MB mixed corpus with byte-level verification
• •7z LZMA2 max gives best mainstream ratio (~60%); tar.zst offers near-instant decompression
• •ZIP remains the best default for cross-platform sharing; past xz/7z, returns diminish sharply

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