tar z,j,J - options for compress with gzip, bzip2, xz

No compression:

$ time sudo tar cvf /tmp/etc.tar /etc
real	0m0.037s
user	0m0.004s
sys	0m0.010s

gzip compression:

$ time sudo tar czvf /tmp/etc.tar.gz /etc
real	0m0.162s
user	0m0.001s
sys	0m0.010s

bzip2 compression:

$ time sudo tar cjvf /tmp/etc.tar.bz2 /etc
real	0m0.754s
user	0m0.005s
sys	0m0.009s

xz compression:

$ time sudo tar cJvf /tmp/etc.tar.xz /etc
real	0m1.463s
user	0m0.012s
sys	0m0.000s

Final files size:

$ ls -la /tmp/etc.tar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10158080 Oct 15 19:35 /tmp/etc.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1446602 Oct 15 19:37 /tmp/etc.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1606001 Oct 15 19:36 /tmp/etc.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1164600 Oct 15 19:37 /tmp/etc.tar.xz