The following is an evaluation of various compression utilities that I tested when reviewing the various options for MySQL backup strategies. The overall winner in performance was pigz, a parallel implementation of gzip. If you use gzip today as most organizations do, this one change will improve your backup compression times.
Details of the test:
- The database is 5.4GB of data
- mysqldump produces a backup file of 2.9GB
- The server is an AWS t1.xlarge with a dedicated EBS volume for backups
The following testing was performed to compare the time and % compression savings of various available open source products. This was not an exhaustive test with multiple iterations and different types of data files.
| Compression Utility |
Compression Time (sec) |
Decompression Time (sec) |
New Size (% Saving) |
|---|---|---|---|
| lzo (-3) | 21 | 34 | 1.5GB (48%) |
| pigz (-1) | 43 | 33 | 995MB (64%) |
| pigz (-3) | 56 | 34 | 967MB (67%) |
| gzip (-1) | 81 | 43 | 995MB (64%) |
| fastlz | 92 | 128 | 1.3GB (55%) |
| pigz [-6] | 105 | 25 | 902MB (69%) |
| gzip (-3) | 106 | 43 | 967MB (67%) |
| compress | 145 | 36 | 1.1GB (62%) |
| pigz (-9) | 202 | 23 | 893MB (70%) |
| gzip [-6] | 232 | 78 | 902MB (69%) |
| zip | 234 | 50 | 902MB (69%) |
| gzip (-9) | 405 | 43 | 893MB (70%) |
| bzip2 | 540 | 175 | 757MB (74%) |
| rzip | 11 minutes | 360 | 756MB (74%) |
| lzo (-9) | 20 minutes | 82 | 1.2GB (58%) |
| 7z | 33 minutes | 122 | 669MB (77%) |
| lzip | 47 minutes | 132 | 669MB (77%) |
| lzma | 58 minutes | 180 | 639MB (78%) |
| xz | 59 minutes | 160 | 643MB (78%) |
Observations
- The percentage savings and compression time of results will vary depending on the type of data that is stored in the MySQL database.
- The pigz compression utility was the surprising winner in best compression time producing at least a size of gzip. This was a full 50% faster than gzip.
- For this compression tests, only one large file was used. Some utilities work much better with many smaller files.
Find our more information of these tests and the results in Effective MySQL: Backup and Recovery