Zstd can achieve good compression ratio for many data patterns and is super fast to create, and decompresses at multiple GB/s with a halfway decent CPU, often hitting disk bandwidth limits.
I've never tried lzop or met someone who advocated to use it.
Needs research, perhaps. Until then I'm healthily skeptical.
LZO has been around since the 90's. There are multiple distros which use it (as an option) for archive downloads. It was the recommended algorithm to use for btrfs compressed volumes for years. It's pretty standard, about as common as .bz2 in my experience.
When does it make sense to use lzop (or the similar but more widely recommended LZ4) for static storage? My impression was that it was a compressor for when you want to put less bytes onto the transmission / storage medium at negligible CPU cost (in both directions) because your performance is limited by that medium (fast network RPC, blobs in databases), not because you want to take up as little space as possible on your backup drive. And it does indeed lose badly in compression ratio even to zlib on default settings (gzip -6), let alone Zstandard or LZMA.
I used lzop in the past when speed was more of a concern than compressed size (big disk images etc.)
For a couple of years now I have switched to zstd. It is both fast and well compressed by default in that use case, no need to remember any options.
No, I have NOT done any deeper analysis except a couple of comparisons which I haven't even documented. But they ended up in slight favor of zstd, so I switched. But nothing dramatic making me say forget lzop.
