pgzip (conda): `pgzip` is a multi-threaded `gzip` implementation for `python` that increases the compression and decompression performance.  Compression and decompression performance gains are made by parallelizing the usage of block indexing within a `gzip` file. Block indexing utilizes gzip's `FEXTRA` feature which records the index of compressed members. `FEXTRA` is defined in the official `gzip` specification starting at version 4.3. Because `FEXTRA` is part of the `gzip` specification, `pgzip` is compatible with regular `gzip` files.  `pgzip` is **~25X** faster for compression and **~7X** faster for decompression when benchmarked on a 24 core machine. Performance is limited only by I/O and the `python` interpreter.  Theoretically, the compression and decompression speed should be linear with the number of cores available. However, I/O and a language's general performance limits the compression and decompression speed in practice.
Keywords: compression|gzip|python|zip