Pigz: Superfast on the zip but slower on the unzip!

If you have linux you have some real control  - and can easily access supertools. Such as pigz which can unzip or zip - a file using mutiple cores. We will install pigz with:

sudo apt install pigz

• pigz (zips files)
• unpigz (unzips files)

Got it.

Benchmark: Ryzen5 2600 (6 Core / 12 Thread) unzipping Windows 11 (23G) for VM Ware from here: Disk is ssd 1TB. So it's a respectfully fast machine.

Standard unzip (used 1 core):

time unzip win.zip

time unpigz win.zip

It is interesting in that even when setting thread count to 12 only 4 seem to be activated - and they hardly seem busy.

Slower! No way!  That was actually disappointing.  Anyways maybe it is better at zipping stuff?

Ok now to look the other direction. How long to zip the same large file.?  Do recall this file already is a zip file.

time zip test.zip windev_VM_vmware

Uses only 1 core - but it is 100% loaded:

It took a while coming in at 10 minutes 14 seconds -and it is actually larger.

Now let's try this again with pigz:

time pigz windev_VM_vmware

This is where it got interesting - now all the cores are blasting away:

Unreal - there you have it pigz shines in compressing..  But for uncompressing standard unzip beats it hands down.  This has not factored compression levels and other factors but you are looking at a 3:1 improvement ratio on your zip tasks.