Since our move to multicore over faster processors, I'm sure we'll see a lot of this sort of thing, that is, people suddenly realizing that their code will be some multiple faster if they can find a way to do operations in parallel. I imagine that the compression itself might be slightly less optimal however since similar blocks that could be compressed are on different threads? I didn't dig into how this might or might not be a concern with this project, however. Long of the short of it, however, parallel is the reality. In theory one could arbitrarily split the file, and then compress each of the splits and get a speed up that is roughly comparable?