@sherman: Decompression is where it's truly impressive, and that's what I was going for (coupled w/ a decent compression ratio, since the actual bottleneck is liable to be the Wifi, anyway)
. Here, to get a compression ratio that's still worse than xz's defaults, I jump to --ultra -20, and it's then *slower* than xz (on the host, x64, both threaded).
(I mention xz because I've actually been using xz for these for quite a while on the Kindle side of things, and decompression speed is fairly nice (IIRC, better than both gzip & bz2)
).
But, yeah, if I needed the reverse (i.e, quick on-device compression, without particularly caring about the compression ratio), LZ4 would definitely be the top contender
.