Wednesday, November 30, 2016

ZSTD - A new compression tool

I has some personal interest in compression. Recently, I found this new compression tool: ZStd. It compresses much faster than gzip with better compression ratio.

For a not so scientific benchmark ^_^, to compress linux-4.4.34.tar (648867840 bytes) kernel, time reports the following:

time zstd linux-4.4.34.tar
real    0m5.157s
user    0m4.116s
sys     0m0.534s

time gzip -k linux-4.4.34.tar
real    0m21.255s
user    0m20.891s
sys     0m0.175s

time xz  -k linux-4.4.34.tar
real    4m21.785s
user    4m21.430s
sys     0m0.265s

648867840  linux-4.4.34.tar
132581836  linux-4.4.34.tar.zst (20.43%)    5.157s
137210920  linux-4.4.34.tar.gz  (21.15%)   21.255s
 90543184  linux-4.4.34.tar.xz  (13.95%) 4m21.785s

It took zstd much less time to compress with slightly better compression than gzip. For a better benchmark, please refer to the zstd's home page.

There is a SlackBuilds package maintain by me for Slackware also.