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.

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 excellent decompression speed.

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 the Open-Source Benchmark program by m^2 (v0.14.3) compiled with GCC v4.8.2 on Linux Mint 64-bits v17. The reference system uses a Core i5-4300U @1.9GHz. Benchmark evaluates the compression of reference Silesia Corpus in single-thread mode.

Compressor	Ratio	Compression	Decompression
memcpy	1.000	4200 MB/s	4200 MB/s
LZ4 fast 17 (r129)	1.607	690 MB/s	2220 MB/s
LZ4 default (r129)	2.101	385 MB/s	1850 MB/s
LZO 2.06	2.108	350 MB/s	510 MB/s
QuickLZ 1.5.1.b6	2.238	320 MB/s	380 MB/s
Snappy 1.1.0	2.091	250 MB/s	960 MB/s
LZF v3.6	2.073	175 MB/s	500 MB/s
zlib 1.2.8 -1	2.730	59 MB/s	250 MB/s
LZ4 HC (r129)	2.720	22 MB/s	1830 MB/s
zlib 1.2.8 -6	3.099	18 MB/s	270 MB/s

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.