MegaLZ

Introduction

MegaLZ (working title) is a compression format and an associated compression program which offers high compression and decompression speed. Compression speed can be traded for compression ratio, allowing MegaLZ to outperform commonly used alternatives on either metric.

Why MegaLZ is Fast

MegaLZ is fast, because the compressed format is defined in terms of bytes and spans of bytes. By contrast, many commonly used compression formats save space by trying to encode bytes in fewer than 8 bits. This does indeed allow for smaller compressed size, but also makes compression and decompression slower. MegaLZ gives up some compression for faster throughput here. Other compression formats that also do this include LZ4 and LZOP.

Why MegaLZ Compresses Well