[klauspost]

By "compressing" random data you are bypassing gzip, since it will just store your data as uncompressed blocks, making "decompression" a memcopy.

With real data, deflate maxes out somewhere around there either way, but that is a bit coincidental.

With modern CPUs getting increasingly smaller IPC improvements this will likely be pretty much the max decompression speed we can expect from gzip going forward.

[yakubin]

It actually made the file bigger (1.1G from 1.0G) :)

I was getting the same numbers with text data I have scattered on my disk, but those were small, so I decided to generate a bigger file. But, yes, I agree a more robust benchmark would use a Mark Twain novel e.g.