bzip3
Ranked 7 of 14 compression tools by recommenders
Recommended for strong compression on some data, such as Wikipedia XML dumps, and speed in some tests. Critics say decompression is slow and memory-heavy and it often trails zstd.
Recommended for strong compression on some data, such as Wikipedia XML dumps, and speed in some tests. Critics say decompression is slow and memory-heavy and it often trails zstd.
24 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 12
- approval share
- 50%
Recommended in 2 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 2 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong compression on some data
“I got some really good results with bzip3 compression Wikipedia XML dumps”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “Impressive compression benchmark. Four times smaller than z standard.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “The latter compressed better and was about 8x faster.”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” - Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip”
Faster than zstd in some tests
“Tested it myself and found that it often also does slightly worse than zstd -19 in compression ratio but faster”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “The latter compressed better and was about 8x faster.”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “bzip3 was 7x faster and had ~20% better compression”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Decompression is slow and memory-heavy
“But the decompression (memory and speed) is a different story.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “4-core zstd decompression was 2.05 seconds vs a whopping 297 seconds for bzip3 -dj4”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “512GB is a huge block size for bzip3, as it needs to basically all be in memory”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” - Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “bzip3”
- Comment from 9 Sep 2026 in “bzip3”
Often worse than zstd on other data
“the initial extremely favorable conclusion was short-lived, because trying later bzip3 on other data files gave worse results than zstd”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “Tested it myself and found that it often also does slightly worse than zstd -19 in compression ratio but faster”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “later I have also found other cases where the bzip3 performance was not so good”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” Name taken from bzip project
“How is this not just taking their established name for your own project with the version number +1?”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “it's a bit weird to release, say, Windows 12 without permission from the authors of Windows 11”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “It's distasteful to use such a name when it's not created by the bzip authors.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” Benchmarks look cherry-picked
“The benchmarks are disingenuous, to the point of looking cherry-picked.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “how is this an honest benchmark”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3”
Other compression tools people recommend
The four most recommended other compression tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zstandard (zstd) | 111 | 14 | 89% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Brotli | 24 | 18 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
| gzip | 23 | 13 | 64% | 8 | — | — |
| tar | 19 | 13 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| bzip3This page | 12 | 12 | 50% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
25 of the 27 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“The latest release being a year old for a tool like this is not something to worry about.”
“decompression should be optimized for low-end devices”
“I was fearing that this was the catch here as well”
“Bzip3 uses a proper SAIS library for the forward and backward transforms.”
“those decompression requirements are a massive impost”
“But the decompression (memory and speed) is a different story.”
“bzip3 not a terribly impressive or useful compression algo.”
“it comes in relatively well, in my opinion”
“I got some really good results with bzip3 compression Wikipedia XML dumps”
“It's distasteful to use such a name when it's not created by the bzip authors.”
“4-core zstd decompression was 2.05 seconds vs a whopping 297 seconds for bzip3 -dj4”
“DO NOT COMPRESS ANY DATA WITH THIS PROGRAM UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED TO ACCEPT THE POSSIBILITY, HOWEVER SMALL, THAT THE DATA WILL NOT BE RECOVERABLE.”
“it's probably not realistically competitive”
“512GB is a huge block size for bzip3, as it needs to basically all be in memory”
“The claim “stronger than bzip2” is strange. What does it even mean?”
“The benchmarks are disingenuous, to the point of looking cherry-picked.”
“Tested it myself and found that it often also does slightly worse than zstd -19 in compression ratio but faster”
“the initial extremely favorable conclusion was short-lived, because trying later bzip3 on other data files gave worse results than zstd”
“how is this an honest benchmark”
“Impressive compression benchmark. Four times smaller than z standard.”
“How is this not just taking their established name for your own project with the version number +1?”
“later I have also found other cases where the bzip3 performance was not so good”
“The latter compressed better and was about 8x faster.”
“it's a bit weird to release, say, Windows 12 without permission from the authors of Windows 11”
“bzip3 was 7x faster and had ~20% better compression”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.