Zstandard (zstd)

“my local experiments showed any tricky scheme I could come up beaten by plain large window zstd”

“not in compression density, I don't believe, but yeah, along most other metrics”

“the decompression speed is incredible, so much so that I store everything in zstd”

“For the same CPU utilization if provides twice dense compression compared to regular [-6] gzip”

“the best general purpose compression algorithm, in terms of compression ratio to CPU used”

“Otherwise, if zstd is easy to add, IMO I would always prefer, zstd, lz4 or brotli.”

“zstd gives you up to 22 for ultra compression and negative compression levels for ultra fast”

“It didn't work, or the gains were so marginal that I ended up scrapping the approach.”

“zstd is the go-to compression format these days. It's even supported in low-level software such as many linux filesystems.”

“all that "more" has been ridiculously more optimized in zstd and other modern compression methods”

“If we match the window size of zstd to that of bzip3 we get dramatically different results”

“With a dictionary, small objects - even just a couple of bytes - compress well.”

“Huge assets took less hard drive space, took less time to download, and took less time to decompress.”

“instead of tweaking the whole tunnel once, you can use --adapt to dynamically adjust to i/o conditions”

“zstd, with 1-3 effort (you may even find negative is a overall win), and a trained dictionary”

“if instead you take a raw bitmap and compress it with ZSTD, it typically will be better”

“Zstd already follows the pareto line very closely and also decompresses pretty fast”

“Practical tools, even modern ones like zstd, are mostly based around sliding window compression”

“I found with using various tricks I can get the zstd parquet to be up to 10x (or more) smaller”

“you're better off both in developer ergonomics and speed/space slapping zstd across a flatter binary format”

“I'm used to zstd which by default uses a 128MB window and I usually set it to the max”

“zstd -19 gave me the best results for small file sizes and fast decompression of text data”

“There's also zstd's flush ability that I've used for streaming robotics data.”

“It helps speed it up at high compression levels, though not as much as I'd like.”

“While it might not compress as small, it decompresses way faster, and might make up for the few extra bytes sent.”

“Zstd, on the other hand, aims to be a “better gzip”, in that it's compresses about as fast as gzip but packs somewhat denser”

“Of course for other kinds of files, zstd wins, but all the claims that zstd should be used for ALL applications are extremely wrong.”

“zstd is pretty much Pareto optimal at all settings when looking at size vs. decompression speed”

“they're considered to have better tradeoffs in teems of collision compression time and overall space saved by compression”

“use zstd, which is better and faster, both at compression and decompression”

“If you use Zstandard layers instead of gzip layers, startup time is improved.”

“Having zstd in the stdlib means you can do dictionary-based compression tricks in any Python 3.14 environment”

“Zstandard is a good compressor, but it's not magical; comparing the compressed size of Zstd(A+B) to the common size of Zstd(A) + Zstd(B) is effectively just a complicated way of measuring how many words and phrases the two documents have in common.”

“zstd might lose out there, the answer seems to vary based on the tests I look at, but it seems to be better across a very wide range”

“on a read-many format like pdf zstd's decompression speed is a much better fit”

“competitive with Brotli, which is impressive given how much faster it is to decompress”

“no combination of flags to zstd gets it to match the size of brotli's output on that particular file”

“probably gets you most of the benefit without giving up independence of compression”

“Modern browsers support brotli or zstd, which is a lot better in terms of compression.”

“RePair is faster than compressing with zstd and the size reduction is almost the same”