LZ4 - Extremely fast compression ================================ LZ4 is lossless compression algorithm, providing compression speed at 400 MB/s per core, scalable with multi-cores CPU. It also features an extremely fast decoder, with speed in multiple GB/s per core, typically reaching RAM speed limits on multi-core systems. A high compression derivative, called LZ4_HC, is also provided. It trades CPU time for compression ratio. |Branch |Status | |------------|---------| |master | [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/Cyan4973/lz4.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/Cyan4973/lz4) | |dev | [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/Cyan4973/lz4.svg?branch=dev)](https://travis-ci.org/Cyan4973/lz4) | > **Branch Policy:** > - The "master" branch is considered stable, at all times. > - The "dev" branch is the one where all contributions must be merged before being promoted to master. > - If you plan to propose a patch, please commit into the "dev" branch. Direct commit to "master" are not permitted. > - Feature branches can also exist, for dedicated testing of larger modifications before merge into "dev" branch. Benchmarks ------------------------- The benchmark uses the [Open-Source Benchmark program by m^2 (v0.14.2)](http://encode.ru/threads/1371-Filesystem-benchmark?p=33548&viewfull=1#post33548) compiled with GCC v4.6.1 on Linux Ubuntu 64-bits v11.10, The reference system uses a Core i5-3340M @2.7GHz. Benchmark evaluates the compression of reference [Silesia Corpus](http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/~sdeor/index.php?page=silesia) in single-thread mode.
CompressorRatioCompressionDecompression
LZ4 (r101)2.084422 MB/s1820 MB/s
LZO 2.062.106414 MB/s600 MB/s
QuickLZ 1.5.1b62.237373 MB/s420 MB/s
Snappy 1.1.02.091323 MB/s1070 MB/s
LZF2.077270 MB/s570 MB/s
zlib 1.2.8 -12.73065 MB/s280 MB/s
LZ4 HC (r101)2.72025 MB/s2080 MB/s
zlib 1.2.8 -63.09921 MB/s300 MB/s
The LZ4 block compression format is detailed within [lz4_block_format.txt](lz4_block_format.txt). For streaming unknown amount of data and compress files of any size, a frame format has been published, and can be consulted within the file LZ4_Frame_Format.html .