Qvm-backup compression filter execution time and output size comparison

General Discussion
26

I did a real-life comparison during my weekly backups, comparing some compression filters.

Conditions:

  • HP Elitebook 820 G1 laptop
  • Intel i5-4300u, 2 cores / 4 threads (SMT enabled in Xen config)
  • 16GB DDR3 RAM
  • Transcend 240GB MTS420S M.2 SATA drive used for OS and varlibqubes pool. BTRFS
  • Only dom0 and sys-usb running.
  • Backup to Kioxia U301 128GB USB 3.2 stick
  • 32 qubes including 15 templates (Debian, Fedora, Archlinux, Whonix, Alpine, Kicksecure, …).
  • AppVMs are usually used for browsing (so some browser cache exists) and coding (so considerable text files exist). But not too much video or audio.
  • Total size: 110.7 GiB

Results:

Compression filter Backup time Backup size Backup verification time
gzip (default) 123m 8s 622ms 37.4 GiB 29m 5s 483s
pigz (Parallel Gzip) 52m 52s 279ms 35.8 GiB 29m 59s 242ms
zstdmt (Z Standard multi-thread) 41m 56s 15ms 36.4 GiB 32m 23s 946ms

cc @tanky0u

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