Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

The pigz option

In simple terms, pigz allows multiple threads on multiple cores during the .gzip compression backup. The standard .gzip backup process uses a single core, which is why the backup is slower. Using the pigz package, we can notify the backup process to use multiple cores, thus speeding up the backup and restore process. pigz is basically a .gzip, but with multi-core support. It is not installed in Proxmox by default. We can install it using the following command:

# apt-get install pigz  

In order to enable pigz for backup, we need to select the .gzip compression level for the backup task in GUI. Then, the following pigz option in the backup configuration file enables the pigz feature:

pigz: 1 

By default, this value is 0 and is ...