LZ4 is lossless compression algorithm, providing compression speed at 400 MB/s per core (0.16 Bytes/cycle).
It also features an extremely fast decoder, with speed in multiple GB/s per core (0.71 Bytes/cycle).
A high compression derivative, called LZ4_HC, is also provided.
It trades CPU time for compression ratio.
<a name="benchmarks"></a>
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.
<div>
<ul id="tabs" class="nav nav-tabs" data-tabs="tabs">
<li class="active"><a href="#tab-1" data-toggle="tab">Transfer + Decompression Time<br/>@1000Mbit/s</a></li>
<li ><a href="#tab-2" data-toggle="tab">Compression + Transfer + Decompression Time<br/>@1000Mbit/s</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="my-tab-content" class="tab-content">
<div id="tab-1" class="tab-pane container-fluid active">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-justify">
<h2>Transfer + Decompression Time @1000Mbit/s <small>(without I/O overwrapping, multithreading)</small></h2>
<p>
This benchmark simulates simple "static content transfer" scenario such as OS Kernel compression
or video game's static assets (text/images/tables/scripts/etc) which loading from Flash Memory / HDD / SSD.
</p>
<p>
In this case, compression time is completely ignored.
Because only content developers compress the data at once and usually they don't care about its computational cost.
But they always care enduser's experience a.k.a. "loading time" and bandwidth.
</p>
<p>
Please pay attention to "LZ4HC -9" which is quite faster than other methods.
</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8"
style="height:34em;"
data-csv-props='{
"csvSrc": "csv/benchmark-silesia-1000mbps-offline-compression.csv",
"csvGvType": "google.visualization.ColumnChart",
"csvGvPackage": "corechart",
"chartArea": {"width": "80%", "height": "30em"},
"legend": {"position": "top"},
"isStacked": "true",
"vAxis": {"title": "Seconds" },
"title": "Transfer + Decompression Time\nSMALLER IS BETTER"
}'
></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="tab-2" class="tab-pane container-fluid">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-justify">
<h2>Compression + Transfer + Decompression Time @1000Mbit/s <small>(without I/O overwrapping, multithreading)</small></h2>
<p>
This benchmark simulates "dynamic content transfer" scenario such as filesystems, caches, network packets, IPC/RPCs, and databases.
</p>
<p>
In this case, both compression and decompression times are important.
You can observe "Fast compression algorithms" are better than traditional algorithms such as DEFLATE (zlib).
</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8"
style="height:34em;"
data-csv-props='{
"csvSrc": "csv/benchmark-silesia-1000mbps.csv",
"csvGvType": "google.visualization.ColumnChart",
"csvGvPackage": "corechart",
"chartArea": {"width": "80%", "height": "30em"},
"legend": {"position": "top"},
"isStacked": "true",
"vAxis": {"title": "Seconds" },
"title": "Compression + Transfer + Decompression Time\nSMALLER IS BETTER"
}'
></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
## Documentation
The LZ4 block compression format is detailed within [lz4_Block_format](lz4_Block_format.md).
For streaming arbitrarily large amount of data, or compress files of any size,
a frame format has been established, detailed within the file [lz4_Frame_format](lz4_Frame_format.md).
<br/>
<a name="interoperable-lz4"></a>
## Interoperable LZ4 versions
The following versions are provided for languages beyond the C reference version.
They are in conformance with the LZ4 [block] and [frame] specifications, and are therefore interoperable.
|Language |Author |URL |
|-- |-- |-- |
|__Javascript__ |Pierre Curto |https://github.com/pierrec/node-lz4 |
|__C++11 multi-threads__ |Takayuki Matsuoka |https://github.com/t-mat/lz4mt |
|__Python__ |Christopher Jackson |https://github.com/darkdragn/lz4tools |
|__Delphi__ |Hanno Hugenberg |https://github.com/Hugie/lz4-delphi |
|__Go__ |Pierre Curto |https://github.com/pierrec/lz4 |
|__Rust__ |Artem Navrotskiy |https://github.com/bozaro/lz4-rs |
[block]:lz4_Block_format.md
[frame]:lz4_Frame_format.md
<br/>
<a name="other-languages"></a>
## Multiple languages
The following versions compress data blocks with LZ4 compression algorithm using various programming languages.
Each version encapsulates the compressed result into its own header/frame format convention.
|Language |Author |URL |
|-- |-- |-- |
|__Java__ |Adrien Grand |https://github.com/jpountz/lz4-java |
|__Python__ |Steeve Morin |http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lz4 |
|__Perl__ |Gray |http://search.cpan.org/dist/Compress-LZ4/ |
|__C#__ |Milosz Krajewski |http://lz4net.codeplex.com |
|__C#__ streaming |Phill Djonov |https://github.com/pdjonov/Lz4Stream |
|__Go__ |Branimir Karadzic |https://github.com/bkaradzic/go-lz4 |
|__Ruby__ |Komiya Atsushi |http://rubygems.org/gems/lz4-ruby |
|__PHP__ |Kamijo |https://github.com/kjdev/php-ext-lz4 |
|__Lua__ |Christophe Delord |http://cdsoft.fr/bl/bonaluna.html |
|__D__ |Jude Young |http://code.dlang.org/packages/lz4-d |
|__Haskell__ |Mark Wotton |http://hackage.haskell.org/package/lz4 |
|__Erlang__ |Tetsuya Suzuki |https://github.com/szktty/erlang-lz4 |
|__Smalltalk__ (Pharo) |Mariano Martinez Peck |http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~marianopeck/LZ4/ |
|__OCaml__ |Peter Zotov |https://github.com/whitequark/ocaml-lz4 |
|__Rust__ |Alex Crichton |http://alexcrichton.com/rust-compress/compress/lz4/index.html |
|__8088 assembly__ decoder |Jim Leonard |http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088 |
|__6502 & 65C02 assembly__ decoder |Peter Ferrie |http://pferrie.host22.com/misc/appleii.htm |
|__Atari XL/XE assembly__ decoder |xxl |http://xxl.atari.pl/?p=1524 |
|__65c816 assembly__ decoder |Olivier Zardini |http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/crossdevtools/lz4/index.html |
<br/>
<a name="lz4-is-used-by"></a>
## LZ4 is used by
#### Operating Systems
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.linux.org" ><img src="images/logo50/linux.png" /><span> Linux</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.freebsd.org/"><img src="images/logo50/freebsd.png"/><span> FreeBSD</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.illumos.org/"><img src="images/logo50/illumos.png"/><span> Illumos</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://smartos.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/smartos.png"/><span> SmartOS</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### File Systems
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page"><img src="images/logo50/openzfs.png" /><span> OpenZFS</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/" ><img src="images/logo50/hammer.png" /><span> HAMMER2</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://squashfs.sourceforge.net/" ><img src="images/logo50/squashfs.png"/><span> SquashFS</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.lessfs.com/wordpress/" ><img src="images/logo50/lessfs.png" /><span> LessFS</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://leo-project.net/leofs/" ><img src="images/logo50/leofs.png" /><span> LeoFS</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/" ><img src="images/logo50/grub.png" /><span> GNU GRUB</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Big Data
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://hadoop.apache.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/hadoop.png" /><span> Hadoop</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://cassandra.apache.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/cassandra.png" /><span> Cassandra</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://hbase.apache.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/hbaseW90.png" /><span> Hbase</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.rarelogic.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/rarelogic.png" /><span> Rarelogic</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://spark.apache.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/spark.png" /><span> Spark</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/chango/hustle" ><img src="images/logo50/hustleW90.png" /><span> Hustle</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Search Engine
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://lucene.apache.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/lucene.png" /><span> Lucene</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://lucene.apache.org/solr/" ><img src="images/logo50/solr.png" /><span> solr</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.scalyr.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/scalyr.png" /><span> Scalyr</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://kafka.apache.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/kafka.png" /><span> Kafka</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Database
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.mysql.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/mysql.png" /><span> MySQL</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.tokutek.com/tokudb-for-mysql/" ><img src="images/logo50/tokudb.png" /><span> Tokudb</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.delphix.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/delphix.png" /><span> Delphix</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.infinisql.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/infinisql.png" /><span> infiniSQL</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://rocksdb.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/rocksdb.png" /><span> RocksDB</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://olegdb.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/olegdb.png" /><span> OlegDB</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Games
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.battlefield.com/battlefield-4" ><img src="images/logo50/battlefield4.png" /><span> Battlefield 4</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.guildwars2.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/guildwars2.png" /><span> Guild Wars 2</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.crytek.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/crytek.png" /><span> Crytek</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.sinemoragame.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/sinemora.png" /><span> Sine Mora</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.mediatonic.co.uk/blog/1000-tiny-claws-out-today"><img src="images/logo50/1000tinycraws.png" /><span> 1000 Tiny Claws</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Graphics
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.nvidia.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/nvidia.png" /><span> nVidia</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.enlightenment.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/enlightment.png" /><span> Enlightenment</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.xpra.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/xpra.png" /><span> Xpra</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.openvdb.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/openvdb.png" /><span> OpenVDB</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://scap.codeplex.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/placeholder.png" /><span> Scaplib</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/flanglet/kanzi" ><img src="images/logo50/placeholder.png" /><span> kanzi</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Network
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.freenas.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/freenas.png" /><span> freeNAS</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://openvpn.net/" ><img src="images/logo50/openvpn.png" /><span> openVPN</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://netty.io/" ><img src="images/logo50/netty.png" /><span> Netty</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://dovecot.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/dovecot.png" /><span> dovecot</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.virtualhere.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/virtualhere.png" /><span> virtualHere</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Storage
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.datastax.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/datastax.png" /><span> DataStax</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.hybrid-san.co.uk/" ><img src="images/logo50/nimblestorage.png" /><span> Nimble Storage</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.nexenta.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/nexenta.png" /><span> Nexenta</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://kaminario.com/flash-array/" ><img src="images/logo50/k2spear.png" /><span> K2 Spear</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://syneto.net/" ><img src="images/logo50/syneto.png" /><span> Syneto OS</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Caching
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRam" ><img src="images/logo50/linux.png" /><span> Zram</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://hhvm.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/hhvm.png" /><span> HHVM</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.zend.com/" ><img src="images/logo50/zend.png" /><span> PHP Zend Optimizer</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
#### Other
<div id="lz4usedby" class="container">
<ul id="icons" class="list-inline">
<li><a href="https://www.mozilla.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/firefox.png" /><span> Mozilla Firefox</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.bareos.org/en/" ><img src="images/logo50/bareos.png" /><span> Bareos</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/" ><img src="images/logo50/gtkwave.png" /><span> GTKWave</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.blosc.org/" ><img src="images/logo50/placeholder.png" /><span> Blosc</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://bitbucket.org/facebook/lz4revlog" ><img src="images/logo50/fb-mercurial.png" /><span> Facebook's Mercurial</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/ptaoussanis/nippy" ><img src="images/logo50/placeholder.png" /><span> Nippy</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd" ><img src="images/logo50/freedesktop.png" /><span> systemd</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
### Special Thanks to
[Takatuki Matsuoka](https://github.com/t-mat/)
who greatly contributed to the creation of this LZ4 webpage
---