provides higher compression ratios. Both are remarkably slower than gzip, but again, provide higher compression ratios. Decompression results are similar, except that lzma/xz tends to be faster to decompress than bzip2. In general though, higher compression requires more processor time. There are any number of comparisons out there on the web that make this same argument, except with data. Here's one: http://tukaani.org/lzma/benchmarks.html That said, there are certainly situations where you have more processor time than you do bandwidth, so adding xz compression as an option for rsync may make sense. It should not be viewed, however, as a win/win situation for all circumstances. One of my favorite ways to highlight the differences in compression algorithms is to change the compression setting on a ZFS volume while under high load (100-200 megabytes/second). The difference in CPU load for LZJB vs. gzip-1 is enormous. --Kyle