LZMA is an abbreviation of Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm.
It is the default compression method of 7z file format in 7-zip
program. The purpose of LZMA utils is to make the usage of LZMA
compression easy on *NIX based systems like GNU/*/Linux and *BSD.

The average compression ratio is usually 30% better than
'gzip --best' and 15% better than 'bzip2 --best'. Some files can
be compressed even over 50% smaller than with gzip. With speed
LZMA cannot compete with gzip in neither compression nor
decompression. With bzip2 LZMA is in par when compressing with
approximately same compression ratio but for smallest file size
the time required can be 5 times the time used by bzip2. Luckily
the same does not apply to decompression speed: even the tightest
LZMA files can be decompressed in time less than a half of the
time that bzip2 would take. This makes LZMA an ideal compression
tool for distributing files in the Internet and on CDs/DVDs
because the files are usually compressed only once but
decompressed many times.