TLDR; Of the various compression algorithms available in python gzip, bz2, lzma, etc, which has the best decompression performance? Full discussion: Python 3 has various modules for compressing/decompressing data including gzip, bz2 and lzma. gzip and bz2 additionally have different compression levels you can set. If my goal is to balance file size (/compression ratio) and decompression speed (compression speed