The best recommendation to avoid timeouts when extracting 1,000,000 Contact records from Salesforce is:

B. Utilize the Bulk API to export the data.

Explanation:
Bulk API is designed for handling large data volumes efficiently and is optimized for large-scale data exports (like 1,000,000 records). It breaks the data into smaller chunks and processes them asynchronously, which helps avoid timeouts and ensures that the data export can be completed smoothly.
Bulk API is specifically suited for data extraction jobs that need to process a large number of records without running into limits like API timeouts.
Why not the other options?
A. Use the SOAP API to export data:

The SOAP API is not ideal for large data volumes. It is synchronous and more prone to hitting timeout limits or other restrictions (like API limits) when dealing with large datasets, such as 1 million records.
C. Use GZIP compression to export the data:

GZIP compression can help reduce the size of the data being transferred, but it does not address the underlying issue of processing large volumes of data within Salesforce. While it may reduce the amount of data being transferred, it doesn't inherently prevent timeouts during data extraction.
D. Schedule a Batch Apex job to export the data:

Batch Apex is useful for processing large data sets within Salesforce itself, but it's not the best approach for extracting large amounts of data to an external system. Additionally, Batch Apex is more appropriate for internal data manipulation rather than data export to external systems. The Bulk API is a better-suited, purpose-built tool for this.
Conclusion:
The Bulk API is the most reliable and efficient choice for extracting large volumes of data (1 million records) from Salesforce without running into performance or timeout issues....