Empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different compression algorithms over save files.
These tests were done using tar [ALGORITHM], and thus use the default parameters.
Careful parameter tuning may allow to you obtain better results.
I intentionally wanted to compare the algorithms without any ad-hoc tuning.
These were the results on a save directory of about 100 MiB.
| Algorithm | Compression ratio | Time taken (s) |
|---|---|---|
| lzma | 13.339% | 25.718277 |
| xz | 13.341% | 32.148706 |
| lzip | 13.465% | 27.184341 |
| bzip2 | 20.809% | 22.573468 |
| zstd | 23.646% | 0.561311 |
| gzip | 24.522% | 3.485473 |
| lzop | 35.281% | 0.32973 |