Use Pigz With Tar For Parallel Compression

tar --use-compress-program="pigz --fast --recursive -k | pv" -cf archive.tar.gz /path/to/dir

--fast is the fastest (lowest) compression level, you can swap it for --best if you need better compression.

-k tells Pigz to keep the files instead of deleting them.

The pv command just adds a progress monitor.