bzip3

2026-09-07 | original

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Why This Matters

BZip3 is a new open-source compressor pitched as a spiritual successor to bzip2, combining a suffix-array-based Burrows-Wheeler transform, a context-mixing entropy coder, and an LZ+prediction pass. In the author's benchmark on a ~large tar of every Perl 5 release, it compressed far smaller than xz, zstd, or bzip2 while decompressing about as fast, though at the cost of very high memory use with large block sizes.

Key Takeaways

BZip3 reported 546MB compressed on the Perl source archive versus 2.06GB for xz, 3.08GB for zstd, and 3.44GB for bzip2 in the author's test.
Decompression was competitive (~4min vs 3:51 for zstd, 4:40 for xz, 9:22 for bzip2), but large block sizes consumed 12–18GB of memory.
It's designed for text and code, installs from source or via package managers such as Homebrew on macOS.

Worth a Look

Samsung T7 Portable SSD — If you're benchmarking compressors on multi-gigabyte tarballs like the Perl source archive, fast local storage keeps the bottleneck in the CPU where it belongs. The Samsung T7 is a pocket-sized USB-C SSD that's great for hauling around big test corpora and archived backups of your compressed data.

See Samsung T7 Portable SSD on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.

BZip3

A better, faster and stronger spiritual successor to BZip2. Features higher compression ratios and better performance thanks to a order-0 context mixing entropy coder, a fast Burrows-Wheeler transform code making use of suffix arrays and a RLE with Lempel Ziv+Prediction pass based on LZ77-style string matching and PPM-style context modeling.

Like its ancestor, BZip3 excels at compressing text or code.

Installation

# If using a git clone (not needed for source packages), first... $ ./bootstrap.sh # All... $ ./configure $ make $ sudo make install

Alternatively, you might be able to install bzip3 using your system's package manager:

On macOS, you can use Homebrew to easily install:

$ brew install bzip3

Perl source code benchmark

First, I have downloaded every version of Perl5 ever released and decompressed them.

... continue reading

Explore topics: bzip3 bzip2 burrows-wheeler transform lz77 data compression