Compression Comparison Guide
Pretty cool article on Tech ARP going over a handful of different compression programs and seeing how they stack up. I was obviously reading through it with a constant eye towards the best of the Free alternatives.
It was interesting to note that my personal experience over the years turns out to be true. If you just need to compress something with no fuss, and without needing to save every last bit of space, gzip is champ. It’s just one of the most efficient compressors out there. (It’s no wonder why Apache uses it to compress web pages prior to sending.)
Unsurprisingly, a proprietary alternative provided the best overall compression. However, once again in keeping with my personal observations, bzip2 and 7zip were both better choices than gzip for saving every last bit of space. But due to the efficiency differences between them I still stick with gzip.
One interesting thing to note here is that 7zip has support for multi-threaded compression. So if you have a multi-core or multi-CPU system, it can provide some pretty good results at a good speed. Unfortunately I can’t throw out any numbers to show how it performs when using the multi-threading setup as I tend to always just default to gzip anyway. 
