Discussion

Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms

jgalt212: My compression algo explorations are like font explorations. I spend a lot of time doing research and testing, but I (almost) always end up coming back to gzip / arial.One notable exception is that for very large files (e.g. 10GB+ mbox archives), we found 7z compressed to 39% and gzip 65%. 7z was about 10% faster as well.

gmiller123456: Probably better called "Taking a Look at Compression Utilities", not really any information on the algorithms other than the high level names of them and a short description.

georgemcbay: For anyone who already has at least a surface level understanding of compression and wants to take a deeper dive, check out Charles Bloom's blog:http://cbloomrants.blogspot.comUnfortunately it has been dormant for some time but there are years of useful knowledge there and he is an uncommonly good presenter of technical knowledge through the written word.

jmagland: I've found that Asymmetric Numeral Systems (you mentioned it briefly) is the optimal practical method for pure entropy encoding. I just posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806122

web007: zstd beats gzip on both speed and size, for every compression level.If you need compatibility then gzip (pigz) or zip (7z) or bz2 (pbzip2) are the best of worse outcomes, but for Pareto front optimal speed and size you want zstd.