I want to second this:
The only way to speed up things in this case, is to cause fewer head movements. If the proprietary program can read from STDIN, or write to STDOUT, then a (de-)compressing pipe seems like a good idea. If you have more than one physical disk, try storing the uncompressed file on a disk different from where the compressed file is located.
Note that you should not decompress the files in place because you then have to recompress them. You can, e.g. "gunzip <file.gz >/tmp/file"

In reply to Re: Re: Best Practices for Uncompressing/Recompressing Files? by Thelonius
in thread Best Practices for Uncompressing/Recompressing Files? by biosysadmin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.