Compress Stats

This repository is dedicated to providing statistics on the performance of compression algorithms. Here you can find the source code for a C program that uses a syscall to create a file of the desired size filled with random bytes.

Stats

Dislaimer:

The following statistics were done on /dev/zram0 in order to get the best read/write performance. This way the performance is as clean as possible.

From the tests carried out it also appears that bzip2 has a size reduction ratio between 0.995 and 0.997 so the size increases. However it must be specified that the file was created without holes (empty bits) therefore impossible to reduce in size. Therefore the ratio data were not reported here. And since brotli is too slow to be tested it is not present.

How to test compression algorithm?

For example to do this you can use the tar tool with the following combination.

tar cf - file | head -c 4294967296 | lz4 | pv -trab > /dev/null

This command creates a tar archive of a file, extracts the first 4 GB, compresses it using the LZ4 algorithm, and displays the compression speed and progress. However, the final compressed output is discarded, as it's directed to /dev/null. Essentially, it's used to measure compression performance without saving the compressed data.

You can use other size (obv) and different algoritm like: zstd, bzip2, gzip, brotli and idk.