Parallel BZIP2: pbzip2
July 7th, 2010
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I find myself compressing files for archival purposes constantly – today I was sitting, waiting on one such compression on a SMP box and thought it seems silly that bzip2 does not use more than one CPU. After a quick flip through the man page for bzip2 I found no way to force it to use more than one core. A quick web search yielded pbzip2 (http://compression.ca/pbzip2/) – another project that does indeed allow you to use more than one CPU for compress and decompression of bzip2 files. A quick test showed a huge reduction in compression time: Read more…
