If you have access to multiprocessor machines (it is easy to rotate a multiprocessor virtual machine on Amazon EC2 or Digital Ocean) / machines with lots of RAM, you should definitely check PBZIP2 :
PBZIP2 is a parallel implementation of the bzip2 file sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear acceleration on SMP machines.
To illustrate: I am now unpacking a large 17 GB file. bzip2 recorded a decompressed file at a speed of 10 Mbps; PBZIP2 writes it now at a speed of 160 Mbps. I run it this way:
pbzip2 -v -d -k -m10000 file.bz2
i.e. -v verbose -d unzip -k save the source file -m1000 to 10Gb RAM
It works on 64 GB of RAM, 20 processors on Digital Ocean, the cost of which is $ 0.952 / hour. :-)
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