pigz

How to compress files much faster with pigz

botond published March 2019, 02, Thu - 14:08 time
Unfortunately, the more common compression programs work on only one thread, so they can't take advantage of today's modern, multi-core processors. In this description, we will learn about the pigz program, which can be used to run the compression process on multiple threads, thereby taking advantage of all the processor cores.

pigz

Manual page and help for the pigz linux command. The Pigz compression program uses threads in order to use multiple processor cores at the same time. It splits the input into 128 KB chunks in parallel. The control values ​​of the individual pieces are also calculated in parallel. The compressed pieces are added to the output and the combined control value is calculated from each control value.