[TheGoodBarn]

Curious, how long would Gzip take to uncompress? Is it faster since it is less compact / efficient on the compression side?

[andrewf]

The bitstream format for Gzip files (PKZIP's "deflate") was established in 1993. In comparison, the much newer Zstd doesn't represent a different tradeoff between compression time / decompression time / size; it's just better overall. There's a nice graph of the different time/compression tradeoffs both can achieve about 1/3rd of the way into https://engineering.fb.com/2016/08/31/core-data/smaller-and-...

[wongarsu]

Decompression speed is one of zstd's biggest advantages (in its class, lz4 is obviously faster in return for worse compression ratios). Zstd decompression is generally at least factor 3 faster than gzip.

[pletnes]

Since the gzip’ed file is larger, it might well be slower since more IO is required. Depends on the case in question, obviously.