Zstandard
The bestest compression ever
Why Compress?
- Redundant data happens everywhere
- CPU time is often more plentiful than I/O bandwidth, especially with networks
- A little compute time up front can save huge long-term storage costs
Popular utilities
- DEFLATE - LZ77 + Huffman
- zip
- gzip
- zstd
- Burrows–Wheeler transform
- bzip2
- LZMA - Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm
- xz
Why zstd?
- Permissive BSD license allows it to be incorporated in many projects
- Optimized for modern hardware
- Built for multi-threading
- Very configurable time vs space
Unique zstd features
- Adaptive compression ratio
- Trainable dictionary
- Optional very long search window
- Rapid integration into many projects
- Kernel, file systems, databases, package managers
Some benchmarks
https://engineering.fb.com/2016/08/31/core-data/smaller-and-faster-data-compression-with-zstandard/
More benchmark
https://engineering.fb.com/2016/08/31/core-data/smaller-and-faster-data-compression-with-zstandard/