LZ4

LZ4 description

LZ4 is a very fast compressor, based on well-known LZ77 (Lempel-Ziv) algorithm.
Originally a fork from LZP2, it provides better compression ratio for text files and reaches impressive decompression speed, in the range and beyond 1GB/s per core (!), especially for binary files. These speeds are scalable with multi-threading modes, quickly reaching RAM speed limits on multi-core systems.

LZ4 compression format is detailed in a dedicated post.

LZ4 is available as a C Open Source project, hosted on Google Code, under a BSD license. A list of ports to other language (Java, C#, Python, etc.) is also maintained on this page.

The version proposed here is for Windows. It works on both 32 and 64 bits systems.
The -c1 mode serves as a living demo for MMC (Morphing Match Chain) search algorithm (explained here).
The -c2 mode is equivalent to lz4hc.

Download :
v1.3.3 : Windows LZ4 installer (setup)

v1.3.3 :  LZ4 Command Line Utility for Windows (stand alone zip, no installation)
What's new :
- corrected a bug in "pipe" decompression mode
- better protection against erroneous data
- smaller installer

Compression level comparison :
Sample Corpus totalizing about 4GB
In-memory benchmark results (-b command)
Benchmark platform : Core 2 Duo E8400 (3GHz), Window Seven 32-bits

v1.3 - 2 Threads
Compression level	Compression Ratio	Speed	Decoding
c0	2.091	555 MB/s	1.80 GB/s
c1	2.343	69.0 MB/s	1.85 GB/s
c2	2.414	40.9 MB/s	1.92 GB/s

You can provide your comments at the LZ4 Forum Group

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They use LZ4 :

Data Servers :

  

The Apache Software Foundation, for

Hadoop

RareLogic, for
Real-Time Data Analytics

Games :

Digital Reality, for

Sine Mora
on

 

 

Mediatonic, for

1000 Tiny Claws
on

Open Source projects :

Search Engine :  Lucene
File System : ZFS
Distributed Storage : Cassandra
Operating System : Illumos, FreeBSD
Desktop GUI :  Enlightment
Boot Loader : GRUB
Screen capture :  ScapLIB

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Donate to LZ4 project
You can provide a token of your appreciation by donating to the LZ4 project :