gzip
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
2recommend
3warn against
Dec 19, 2025first mention
Sep 22, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“I settled on gzip, specifically deflate/inflate.”
“I use quite frequently gzip (executed after lrzip preprocessing) for some very large files”
Caveats and dissent
“works on tiny messages where gzip fails”
“Zstd is still a bit faster (but < ~2X) and also gets better compression ratios”
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
- An Ode to Bzip 3 mentions
- Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module 2 mentions
- Can gzip be a language model? 1 mention
- bzip3 1 mention
- DskDitto: Ultra-fast, parallel duplicate-file detector 1 mention
- Optimizing Lua string literals to save 400 bytes 1 mention
Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 15
“you can classify a test file by topic with gzip as follows”
“I ended up using gzip because it's best supported by the software I use”
“if you use gzip, make sure to set the mtime to 0 when writing the file as this can throw off deduplication.”
“I settled on gzip, specifically deflate/inflate.”
“gzip is competitive with zstd”
“It's like calling gzip but instead of compression level you choose kolmogorov complexity level”
“I use quite frequently gzip (executed after lrzip preprocessing) for some very large files”
“which therefore is not Pareto optimal”
lz4 can still be the right choice when decompression speed matters. It's almost twice as fast at decompression with similar compression ratios to zstd's fast setting. https://github.com/facebook/zstd?tab=readme-ov-file#benchmarks
“outperform their traditional counterparts (e.g. gzip)”
“By comparison GZip can compress it to 321Mb”
“works on tiny messages where gzip fails”
“Zstd is still a bit faster (but < ~2X) and also gets better compression ratios”
“Gzip's is 330 MB/s”
Previously discussed in 2019, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20352439 Someone shared a link to that site in a conversation earlier this year on HN. For a long time now, I've had a gzip bomb sitting on my server that I provide to people that make a certain categories of malicious calls, such as attempts to log in to wordpress, on a site not using wordpress. That post got me thinking about alternative types of bo