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
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. 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 (v0.14.3) 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.

The LZ4 block compression format is detailed within lz4_Block_format.

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 .