While tar -zxvf is the most common approach, it performs sequential decompression which isn't leveraging modern multi-core CPUs. For files over 1GB, this becomes noticeable.

The fastest method combines GNU tar with pigz (parallel implementation of gzip):

tar -I pigz -xvf archive.tar.gz
# Or alternatively:
pigz -dc archive.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Benchmark shows 2-3x speed improvement on 8-core machines for 10GB files.

For maximum speed when compression ratio isn't critical:

• lbzip2: Parallel bzip2 implementation
• plzip: Multi-threaded LZMA
• zstd (Recommended for best balance): tar -I zstd -xvf archive.tar.zst

Extraction speed heavily depends on storage:

# Use tmpfs for temporary extraction (requires enough RAM)
mkdir /tmp/extract_temp && mount -t tmpfs -o size=20G tmpfs /tmp/extract_temp
tar -C /tmp/extract_temp -xvf large_file.tar.gz

For mission-critical operations, combine parallel decompression with optimized I/O:

# Use zstd with parallel threads and direct I/O
zstd -d --threads=0 -o - archive.tar.zst | tar --use-compress-program=pigz -xf -

When dealing with large .tar.gz files (often 10GB+), the traditional tar -zxvf approach becomes inefficient due to:

• Single-threaded decompression (gzip limitation)
• Sequential file writing
• No hardware acceleration

Replace gzip with pigz (parallel implementation):

# Install pigz first (Ubuntu/Debian)
sudo apt-get install pigz

# Decompress with maximum threads
tar --use-compress-program=pigz -xvf large_file.tar.gz

For custom thread count (e.g., 8 threads):

tar -I pigz -xvf large_file.tar.gz -S 8

For modern systems with SSD/NVMe storage:

# Using lbzip2 (alternative parallel bzip2)
tar -I lbzip2 -xvf large_file.tar.bz2

# Using pxz (parallel xz)
tar -I pxz -xvf large_file.tar.xz

Combine parallel extraction with filesystem tweaks:

# Extract to tmpfs (RAM disk) if possible
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=20G tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk
tar --use-compress-program="pigz -k" -xvf large_file.tar.gz -C /mnt/ramdisk

For extremely large archives:

# Partial extraction (single file)
tar --use-compress-program=pigz -xvf large_file.tar.gz path/to/specific.file

# Streaming extraction
pv large_file.tar.gz | pigz -dc | tar -xvf -