LZ4 - Extremely fast compression

LZ4 is lossless compression algorithm, providing compression speed at 400 MB/s per core, scalable with multi-cores CPU. It features an extremely fast decoder, with speed in multiple GB/s per core, typically reaching RAM speed limits on multi-core systems.

Speed can be tuned dynamically, selecting an “acceleration” factor which trades compression ratio for more speed up. On the other end, a high compression derivative, LZ4_HC, is also provided, trading CPU time for improved compression ratio. All versions feature the same decompression speed.

LZ4 library is provided as open-source software using BSD 2-Clause license.

Branch	Status
master
dev

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, or its own feature branch. Direct commit to “master” are not permitted.

Benchmarks

The benchmark uses lzbench, from @inikep compiled with GCC v6.2.0 on Linux 64-bits. The reference system uses a Core i7-3930K CPU @ 4.5GHz. Benchmark evaluates the compression of reference Silesia Corpus in single-thread mode.

Compressor	Ratio	Compression	Decompression
memcpy	1.000	7300 MB/s	7300 MB/s
LZ4 fast 8 (v1.7.3)	1.799	911 MB/s	3360 MB/s
LZ4 default (v1.7.3)	2.101	625 MB/s	3220 MB/s
LZO 2.09	2.108	620 MB/s	845 MB/s
QuickLZ 1.5.0	2.238	510 MB/s	600 MB/s
Snappy 1.1.3	2.091	450 MB/s	1550 MB/s
LZF v3.6	2.073	365 MB/s	820 MB/s
Zstandard 1.1.1 -1	2.876	330 MB/s	930 MB/s
Zstandard 1.1.1 -3	3.164	200 MB/s	810 MB/s
zlib deflate 1.2.8 -1	2.730	100 MB/s	370 MB/s
LZ4 HC -9 (v1.7.3)	2.720	34 MB/s	3240 MB/s
zlib deflate 1.2.8 -6	3.099	33 MB/s	390 MB/s

LZ4 is also compatible and well optimized for x32 mode, for which it provides +10% speed performance.

Documentation

The raw LZ4 block compression format is detailed within lz4_Block_format.

To compress an arbitrarily long file or data stream, multiple blocks are required. Organizing these blocks and providing a common header format to handle their content is the purpose of the Frame format, defined into lz4_Frame_format. Interoperable versions of LZ4 must respect this frame format.

Other source versions

Beyond the C reference source, many contributors have created versions of lz4 in multiple languages (Java, C#, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc.). A list of known source ports is maintained on the LZ4 Homepage.