[denzquix]

From their own benchmarks it seems more like bzip3 is geared towards a different compression/speed trade-off than bzip2, rather than an unambiguous all-around improvement. Am I misreading it?

[once_inc]

That's what I took out of it too. Sacrificed a bit of speed and a lot of memory for a smaller output size.

edit: ah, bzip3 is parallelizable, while bzip2 isn't. That alone is enough for me to be able to claim 'faster'.

[thilog]

bzip2 can exploit concurrency through pbzip2, can't it?

[klauspost]

It is kind of a hack for decompression, where you look forward in the stream for a block signature, and try decompressing from there.

In practice it works, but it isn't pretty ;)

[gjvc]

see also: lbzip2

(context: I have had a situation where files created by pbzip2 on linux were not able to be decompressed with some library on .NET, but using lbzip2, they were. I never looked into the details.)

[Klasiaster]

Can't agree more, lbzip2 is the go-to tool for dealing with bzip2 compression and decompression, it's a whole lot of faster than bzip2 which is single-threaded!