What are best lzip compression options for large game tar archives?

[Hoël Bézier]

Hi!

I’m a regular contributor to ./play.it, an enormous shellscript which aims at 
creating regular distribution packages for commercial games from the installer 
provided by vendors. You can learn more about it at https://www.dotslashplay.it/en/start
or by visiting us on the IRC channel #play.it on OFTC.

Since most distribution packages are tar archives compressed with different 
algorithms (Debian favors bzip2 or xz, Arch favors zstd for example), I thought 
that where possible I could as well provide support for lzip compression 
(mainly for Gentoo actually, as one can write its own support for other 
compression tools) because I do like a lot the way lzip was designed, and game 
packages might be kept around for quite a few years (I still have a tar archive 
of a Warcraft III installation hanging around for at least seven years).

However, since we compress fairly big packages (most popular games nowadays are 
at least 1GB big), current compression with lzip (implemented through tar’s 
--lzip switch) is quite slow. For example, packaging bastion, which is 1.1G 
big, took half an hour on my computer.

Since I have seen that there were several options to lzip that could reduce 
compression time or improve compression ratio, I was wondering if you could 
tell me which options would be most fit for my purpose, and with which caveats, 
if any.

Thank you,
Hoël

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