At PyConUS, I was chatting with @gpshead about adding compression benchmarks. While a lot of the "heavy lifting" of compression happens in the libraries CPython binds (zlib, liblzma, etc.), the handling of output buffers in CPython has a significant impact in performance, and is something we don't have a lot of visibility into the performance of.

One of the better known cross-algorithm compression benchmarks I'm aware of is lzbench, which tests compression performance of the Silesia compression corpus across many algorithms. I figure running compression benchmarks at varied settings on Silesia would provide a good starting point for benchmarking the output buffer and other binding code.