Marcus AdamsSo I think moving forward I'm switching to #AGE for file #encryption instead of #PGP. I occasionally make backup archives of various things and use passphrase encryption with #GPG to encrypt them before storing them. However, GPG is very slow for bigger files, and in some testing recently I discovered AGE is multiple times faster. Also, with their latest release they now support hybrid post #quantum assymmetric key pairs. So for encryption it can fully replace GPG.
So it seems that at least part of the slow-down I experienced with #GPG is because, by default, it gzip compresses the encrypted files. This can be disabled in the command line if you're encrypting an already compressed archive for pretty substantial improvements in encrypt/decrypt speeds. AGE was still faster, but nearly as much.
On a large zst (38.9 GB) archive of my Documents folder, here's some encrypt times.
AGE: 0:28
GPG (w/ compression): 8:12
GPG (w/o compression): 1:19