Was looking at using zstd for backup, and wanted to see the effect of different compression levels. I backed up my (built) bitcoin source, which is a decent representation of my home directory, but only weighs in 2.3GB. zstd -1 compressed it 71.3%, zstd -22 compressed it 78.6%, and here's a graph showing runtime (on my laptop) and the resulting size:

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="814"] zstandard compression (bitcoin source code, object files and binaries) times and sizes[/caption]

For this corpus, sweet spots are 3 (the default), 6 (2.5x slower, 7% smaller), 14 (10x slower, 13% smaller) and 20 (46x slower, 22% smaller). Spreadsheet with results here.