[joshbaptiste]

Had to try this on my quad core laptop, as I never heard of these tools .

  josh@snoopy:~/Downloads $ grep -m2 -i intel  /proc/cpuinfo 
  vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
  model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30GHz

  josh@snoopy:~/Downloads $ ls -l test 
  -rw-r--r-- 1 josh josh 1073741824 2012-03-07 20:06 test

  josh@snoopy:~/Downloads $ time gzip test
  real    0m16.430s
  user    0m10.210s
  sys     0m0.490s

  josh@snoopy:~/Downloads $ time pigz test 
  real    0m5.028s
  user    0m16.040s
  sys     0m0.620s

Looks good.. although the man page describes it as being "an almost compatible replacement for the gzip program".

[kristianp]

That's actually a dual core with hyperthreading. (I'm not just being pedantic, I'm curious as to how well hyperthreading works.) http://ark.intel.com/products/52224

I wonder what the speed looks like with two threads? (pigz -p 2) ?

[alecco]

But what's the compression ratio and what's the test data?

[joshbaptiste]

Test data

  josh@snoopy:~/Downloads $ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1024K count=1000
  
  josh@snoopy:~/Downloads $ gzip -l test.gz 
  compressed        uncompressed  ratio   uncompressed_name
  1176024          1048576000  99.9% test.txt

with -p2 it runs ~2 sec slower

[alecco]

For that kind of data you can just use RLE instead. It's the trivial case (an edge case in fact).