Comparison between Pigz vs Gzip

Compression using Gzip:

$ time gzip <file name>

Compression using Pigz:

$ time pigz <file name>

Decompression using Gzip:

$ time gzip -d test.tar.gz

Decompression using Pigz:

$ time pigz -d test.tar.gz

We can clearly see that in both the vases of compression and decompression pigz is faster than gzip.

Pigz (parallel implementation of gzip) is a free, open-source multi-threaded compression software for Linux that compresses and uncompresses files. Pigz is pronounced as “pig-zee”, it compresses data using the zlib and pthread libraries and takes full advantage of many processors and cores. Pigz can archive larger files significantly quicker than gzip since it compresses using threads to make use of multiple CPUs and cores. To put it another way, pigz performs the same thing as gzip, but it distributes the work across multiple processors and cores while compressing, considerably speeding up the compression/decompression process. Let’s look at how to use Pigz in Linux to compress and decompress files in parallel.