Utilizing multi core for tar+gzip/bzip compression/decompression

I normally compress using tar zcvf and decompress using tar zxvf (using gzip due to habit).

I've recently gotten a quad core CPU with hyperthreading, so I have 8 logical cores, and I notice that many of the cores are unused during compression/decompression.

Is there any way I can utilize the unused cores to make it faster?

Solution 1:

You can also use the tar flag "--use-compress-program=" to tell tar what compression program to use.

For example use:

tar -c --use-compress-program=pigz -f tar.file dir_to_zip 

Solution 2:

You can use pigz instead of gzip, which does gzip compression on multiple cores. Instead of using the -z option, you would pipe it through pigz:

tar cf - paths-to-archive | pigz > archive.tar.gz

By default, pigz uses the number of available cores, or eight if it could not query that. You can ask for more with -p n, e.g. -p 32. pigz has the same options as gzip, so you can request better compression with -9. E.g.

tar cf - paths-to-archive | pigz -9 -p 32 > archive.tar.gz

Solution 3:

Common approach

There is option for tar program:

-I, --use-compress-program PROG
      filter through PROG (must accept -d)

You can use multithread version of archiver or compressor utility.

Most popular multithread archivers are pigz (instead of gzip) and pbzip2 (instead of bzip2). For instance:

$ tar -I pbzip2 -cf OUTPUT_FILE.tar.bz2 paths_to_archive
$ tar --use-compress-program=pigz -cf OUTPUT_FILE.tar.gz paths_to_archive

Archiver must accept -d. If your replacement utility hasn't this parameter and/or you need specify additional parameters, then use pipes (add parameters if necessary):

$ tar cf - paths_to_archive | pbzip2 > OUTPUT_FILE.tar.gz
$ tar cf - paths_to_archive | pigz > OUTPUT_FILE.tar.gz

Input and output of singlethread and multithread are compatible. You can compress using multithread version and decompress using singlethread version and vice versa.

p7zip

For p7zip for compression you need a small shell script like the following:

#!/bin/sh
case $1 in
  -d) 7za -txz -si -so e;;
   *) 7za -txz -si -so a .;;
esac 2>/dev/null

Save it as 7zhelper.sh. Here the example of usage:

$ tar -I 7zhelper.sh -cf OUTPUT_FILE.tar.7z paths_to_archive
$ tar -I 7zhelper.sh -xf OUTPUT_FILE.tar.7z

xz

Regarding multithreaded XZ support. If you are running version 5.2.0 or above of XZ Utils, you can utilize multiple cores for compression by setting -T or --threads to an appropriate value via the environmental variable XZ_DEFAULTS (e.g. XZ_DEFAULTS="-T 0").

This is a fragment of man for 5.1.0alpha version:

Multithreaded compression and decompression are not implemented yet, so this option has no effect for now.

However this will not work for decompression of files that haven't also been compressed with threading enabled. From man for version 5.2.2:

Threaded decompression hasn't been implemented yet. It will only work on files that contain multiple blocks with size information in block headers. All files compressed in multi-threaded mode meet this condition, but files compressed in single-threaded mode don't even if --block-size=size is used.

Recompiling with replacement

If you build tar from sources, then you can recompile with parameters

--with-gzip=pigz
--with-bzip2=lbzip2
--with-lzip=plzip

After recompiling tar with these options you can check the output of tar's help:

$ tar --help | grep "lbzip2\|plzip\|pigz"
  -j, --bzip2                filter the archive through lbzip2
      --lzip                 filter the archive through plzip
  -z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip   filter the archive through pigz

Solution 4:

You can use the shortcut -I for tar's --use-compress-program switch, and invoke pbzip2 for bzip2 compression on multiple cores:

tar -I pbzip2 -cf OUTPUT_FILE.tar.bz2 DIRECTORY_TO_COMPRESS/