Performance Settings

The Performance Settings category focuses on optimizing various aspects of your Proxmox VE system to enhance overall performance. These settings are designed to improve system efficiency and speed up certain operations.

Available Optimizations

1

Configure pigz for Faster gzip Compression

This optimization replaces the default gzip compression withpigz, a parallelized version that speeds up compression by utilizing multiple CPU cores.

What does this configuration do?

• Forces pigz usage in vzdump backups to accelerate Proxmox VE backup compression.
• Ensures pigz is installed before applying optimizations.
• Creates a pigz wrapper script to enforce compression behavior.
• Replaces gzip with the pigz wrapper, making pigz the system-wide default compressor.

How is pigz configured?

This automation executes the following commands:

    # Force pigz usage in vzdump configuration (for Proxmox backups)
    sed -i "s/#pigz:.*/pigz: 1/" /etc/vzdump.conf

    # Install pigz package
    apt-get -y install pigz

    # Create a pigz wrapper script
    cat <<EOF > /bin/pigzwrapper
    #!/bin/sh
    PATH=/bin:$PATH
    GZIP="-1"
    exec /usr/bin/pigz "$@"
    EOF
    chmod +x /bin/pigzwrapper

    # Replace gzip with pigz wrapper (backup original gzip binary)
    if [ ! -f /bin/gzip.original ]; then
        mv -f /bin/gzip /bin/gzip.original
        cp -f /bin/pigzwrapper /bin/gzip
        chmod +x /bin/gzip
    fi
      

How to Verify pigz is Active

You can confirm that pigz is being used by running the following command:

    # Check if gzip now points to pigz
    gzip --version
      

If the output mentions pigz, the replacement was successful.

With this optimization, vzdump backups and all gzip compression tasks benefit from parallel processing, reducing execution time considerably.