In an embodiment of the present invention, the computational efficiency of decoding of block-sorted compressed data is improved by ensuring that more than one set of operations corresponding to a plurality of paths through a mapping array T are being handled by a processor. This sequence of operations, including instructions from the plurality of sets of operations, ensures that there is another operation in the pipeline if a cache miss on any given lookup operation in the mapping array results in a slower main memory access. In this way, the processor utilization is improved. While the sets of operations in the sequence of operations are independent of another other, there will be an overlap of a plurality of the main memory access operations due to the long time required for main memory access.