[oofabz]

That benchmark runs xz with the -9e flags, which turn on its slowest and most memory-intensive mode. If you pass it -0 it only needs 3 MB to compress and 1 MB to decompress.

I usually use -0 with xz because it is extremely fast and memory-efficient yet still compresses better than gzip or bzip2. You can also use -0e for a slower, better compression that still requires only 1 MB to decompress. This way the decompressor can run entirely within the CPU's cache.

[alecco]

Yes, it's in the benchmarks. But comparing against bzip2 is not very meaningful. It's more relevant to compare with compressors in the same efficiency rate. For those flags it compresses to 26MB, in that range there are many equivalent ROLZ/LZP engines with similar numbers. For example csc32 is a bit faster but uses more memory.

http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html#2118

http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html#2300

Proper analysis would need benchmarking with different data and different flags for all compressors.