*edit, as ac29 mentions below, just use zstdmt. In my quick testing it is approximately 8x faster than pbzip2 and gives better compression ratios. Wall clock time went from 41s to 3.5s for a 3.6GB tar of source, pdfs and images AND the resulting file was smaller.
bzip2 is very very slow though. Some types of data compress quite well with bzip, but if high compression is needed, xz is usually as good or better and natively has multithreading available.
For everything else, there's zstd (also natively multithread)
http://compression.ca/pbzip2/
*edit, as ac29 mentions below, just use zstdmt. In my quick testing it is approximately 8x faster than pbzip2 and gives better compression ratios. Wall clock time went from 41s to 3.5s for a 3.6GB tar of source, pdfs and images AND the resulting file was smaller.