# bzip2

9 Hacker News commenters recommended bzip2 and 18 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for files compressed once and decompressed often where size matters. Common caveat: it is slow, and zstd beats it on speed.

## Why people recommend it

- Praised as excellent, worthwhile work (2 comments): "improvements like SSL/TLS, ssh, gzip, bzip2, lz4, Linux, etc. and so many other worthwhile innovations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466775)) "does incredible work but nobody ever talks about" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47378814))

## What people warn about

- Slow to compress and decompress (7 comments): "It was just too slow for the incremental space saving gains offered." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386780)) "Unfortunately, this is one of the major reasons why it's so slow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264240)) "bzip2 is particularly slow because the transform it depends on" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380834))
- Beaten by zstd, xz and lzma (5 comments): "Bzip2 and xz are just no competition for zstd or the gzip family" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384413)) "Bzip is slower than zstd and doesn’t compress as well as xz." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383485)) "lzma gave a much better compression than gzip or bzip2" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599558))
- Hard to seek in large archives (2 comments): "searching for anything that isn't near the beginning of a large file is a pain" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384207)) "you need to seek the entire archive before you can decompress it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379389))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zstandard (zstd)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zstd.md): 111 recommend
- [Brotli](https://hackerapproved.com/p/brotli.md): 24 recommend
- [gzip](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gzip.md): 23 recommend
- [tar](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tar.md): 19 recommend
- [NNCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nncp.md): 15 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "bzip2", https://hackerapproved.com/p/bzip2/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).