Thanks for bringing bzip2 to my attention. I work with largeish files (400-1000M) which I keep compressed to save space. I don't exactly have cycles to spare, but I wanted to see how much better compression I got with bzip2 over gzip. Surprisingly, bzip gave better compression in about half the time. The main caveat (sp?) here is that the files contain DNA sequence data, so it is similar to, but not the same as, a regular text file.

Here's what I got for my test case of 1 file:

Original file size:	316212340
gzip compressed:	96294342
% of original:	30.5%
gzip CPU seconds:	476
bzip2 compressed:	88270646
% of original:	27.9%
bzip2 CPU seconds:	269

Thanks again,
Scott