I took about 59846656KBs of random lossless PNG/lossy JPG files and compressed. They best
compressed as a BZIP2 file and shrank to 58490880KBs at 2.2654165%
compression. That's because BZIP2 does the
best compressing for types of files that are already under some form of compression.
MP3 Compression
347832320KBs of MP3 files best compressed as a BZIP2 file
and shrank to 340414464KBs at 2.13259538% compression. MP3s are not very compressable since
they are already compressed. I think that's the trend for BZIP2;
working best on already compressed files or hard to compress files.
Review Compression
Well, the compressing of a Unique Hardware review of 360448KBs was best done as a 7-ZIP file.
to shrink to a size of 303200KBs at 15.8825% compression. A review is mostly text and a few pictures. So this would be
the type of file most people compress; text and pictures.
Website Compression
When I compressed all of Unique Hardware (except the forums), the 91975680KBs
shrink to a size of 83480576KBs at 9.2362503% compression. This is similar to the review compression test
except much more files and most of them being pictures.
So what's the best?
Well, from these sets of tests, it's safe to say that 7-ZIP
is the best compression. I don't really care for the time it takes
to compress files, since saving time on the server end, saves time on the download end.
7-ZIP can also compress as BZIP2
files, so when you have things that are very hard to compress you can choose
BZIP2.