Comparing some of the most popular data compressors

A good file compressor these days is very essential given the amount of information that is transferred over the internet. Many email services allow only a few Megabits of data storage, not to mention the excessive download time a 50MB file can be for a user on a dial-up connection. So what makes a good compression application? I would say the answer is in the numbers; the numbers of course of the results from the tests we ran on 7 different data compressors using different compression technologies. Collecting several files and categorizing each test, we collected data compression rate, time and space saved for each of the compression applications.