Compression
Compression algorithms
- [
brotli
] ★ — Generally better compression thangzip
with comparable runtime. bzip2
— Freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor.FastLZ
— Small & portable byte-aligned LZ77 compression.gzip
— Single-file/stream lossless data compression utility.libarchive
★ — Provides a common interface to different compression algorithms. Includes thebsdcat
,bsdcpio
, andbsdtar
binaries.lrzip
— Long-range zip. Your choice of compression (lzma
/bzip2
/gzip
). Best if you want to compress very large text files. Not that much development and lingering bugs.lz4
★ — Probably the best algorithm for fast compression. Faster thangzip
. Default for ZFS.lzo
— "Offers pretty fast compression and extremely fast decompression."lzturbo
p7zip
— Best for indexable files. Indexed: can extract single files. CLI is cumbersome on Linux. Use-ms=off
to disable solid compression (compressing multiple files together). This allows files to be extracted on at a time. [LZMA2
,Indexed
]pixz
— Pixz (pronounced pixie) is a parallel, indexing version ofxz
. Indexed: can extract single files. Better CLI than 7z. Got a fatal error last time I tried. [LZMA2
,Indexed
]QuickLZ
— QuickLZ is the world's fastest compression library, reaching 308 Mbyte/s per core.snappy
— Default in Apache Parquet files. Supposed to be faster thangzip
at the expense of lower compression ratios.squashfs
— Compressed file system. Can be accessed in userspace usingsquashfuse
. [gzip
,lzma
,lzo
,xz
,Indexed
]- [
xz
] / [lzma
] — Good compression, but slow. Slowest / best compression ratio. Faster decompression thanbzip2
. zstd
★ — Probably the best algorithm for good compression. Compression can be a bit or a lot slower thangzip
, depending on compression level. Decompression always reasonably fast. Developed at Facebook.
See also:
- http://askubuntu.com/a/258228/229420
- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-file-compression-tools-on-linux-servers
- http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/78273/78327
- http://stackoverflow.com/a/8060136/2063031