Monday, January 24, 2011

LZ4 : World's fastest compressor

 As an unexpected surprise, i learned this morning that a compression benchmark site, Stephan Bush's SqueezeChart, declared LZ4 as the world's fastest compressor.
The final result : 6.4GB of data compressed in 39 seconds.
This is total time, and it tells a lot about the underlying I/O system, since it means reading at 165 MB/s and simultaneously writing the compressed result at 115 MB/s, which means either a RAID array, or a fast SSD (Solid-State Disk).

To be fair, LZ4 is known to be fast, but i was not expecting such a result. Some other more established compressor were supposed to get the graal, most especially QuickLZ, if not LZO. But apparently it ended on LZ4.
Is there any interest in LZ4 being more than just a tool for studying compression ? I'm wondering now.

Anyway, this is a nice little opportunity to brag around :)
You can grab LZ4 at its homepage.

[Edit] : SqueezeChart results have been independantly confirmed by Compression Ratings public benchmark.

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