English: This is a comparison of popular compression formats by how many nanoseconds it takes to compress each format. The horizontal scale shows tens of kilobytes.

To recreate run this on a Linux computer:

for testnum in $(seq 1 256); do
    testnum=$(expr $testnum '*' 10)
    for archiver in bzip2 lzma xz gzip lzip lzop lrzip; do
        dd if=/dev/zero of=$testnum.zero bs="$testnum"'k' count=1
        c=$(date +%s%N)
        $archiver $testnum.zero
        d=$(date +%s%N)
        total=$(echo $d-$c | bc)
        echo $total >> $archiver
        rm $testnum.zero *.bz2 *.lzma *.gz *.xz *.lzo *.lz *.lrz
    done
done
gnuplot <(echo "set terminal svg;set ylabel 'Time (nanoseconds)' textcolor lt 1; set xlabel 'Size (tens of kilobytes)' textcolor lt 2;plot 'lzma' with lines, 'xz' with lines, 'gzip' with lines, 'lzip' with lines, 'lzop' with lines, 'lrzip' with lines, 'bzip2' with lines") > test.svg
rm gzip lrzip lzip lzma lzop xz bzip2