this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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why not gzip?
Gzip is slower and outputs larger compression ratio. Zstandard, on the other hand, is terribly faster than any of the existing standards in means of compression speed, this is its killer feature. Also, it provides a bit better compression ratio than gzip ^citation_needed^.
Yes, all compression levels of gzip have some zstd compression level that is both faster and better in compression ratio.
Additionally, the highest compression levels of zstd are comparable in compression level to LZMA while also being slightly faster in compression and many many times faster in decompression
gzip is very slow compared to zstd for similar levels of compression.
The zstd algorithm is a project by the same author as lz4. lz4 was designed for decompression speed, zstd was designed to balance resource utilization, speed and compression ratio and it does a fantastic job of it.