LZMA VS LZ4

Compare LZMA vs LZ4 and see what are their differences.

LZMA

(Unofficial) Git mirror of LZMA SDK releases (by jljusten)

LZ4

Extremely Fast Compression algorithm (by lz4)
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LZMA LZ4
2 21
40 9,128
- 2.0%
0.0 9.5
over 5 years ago 2 days ago
C++ C
- GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

LZMA

Posts with mentions or reviews of LZMA. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-05-04.
  • Searching Compressed Space
    2 projects | /r/learnpython | 4 May 2021
    And that links to https://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html , in the download there see the DOC folder for documentation? I really can't figure out how that somehow 'sends you back to python's lzma'...

LZ4

Posts with mentions or reviews of LZ4. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-21.
  • Rsyncing 20TB locally
    2 projects | /r/zfs | 21 Mar 2023
    According to these https://github.com/lz4/lz4 values you need around ten (10) quite modern cores in parallel to accomplish around 8GB/s.
  • Cerbios Xbox Bios V2.2.0 BETA Released (1.0 - 1.6)
    2 projects | /r/originalxbox | 31 Dec 2022
  • zstd
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Dec 2022
    > The downside of lz4 is that it can’t be configured to run at higher & slower compression ratios.

    lz4 has some level of configurability? https://github.com/lz4/lz4/blob/v1.9.4/lib/lz4frame.h#L194

    There's also LZ4_HC.

  • I'm new to this
    2 projects | /r/androidroot | 28 Nov 2022
    Get your bootloader unlocked via Download mode and then obtain your stock firmware, preferably for your current region https://samfw.com (Download mode: CARRIER_CODE). Get the boot image from AP with 7zip, unpack from LZ4 with https://github.com/lz4/lz4/releases (drag and drop), patch with Magisk https://github.com/topjohnwu/magisk/releases/latest, grab the new image, name it "boot.img" and pack it into a .tar with 7zip and flash to AP with odin https://odindownload.com
  • An efficient image format for SDL
    4 projects | /r/gamedev | 28 Sep 2022
    After some investigations and experiments, I found out that it was the PNG compression (well, decompression I should say) that took a while. So I've made some experiments using the LZ4 compression library, which is focused on decompression speed, and it turned out to be an excellent solution!
  • Bzip3 – a better and stronger spiritual successor to bzip2
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 May 2022
    If anyone just cares for speed instead of compression I’d recommend lz4 [1]. I only recently started using it. Its speed is almost comparable to memcpy.

    [1] https://github.com/lz4/lz4

  • I just took a random screenshot and made it look prettier. [ I don't know if this counts as fanart ]
    2 projects | /r/PixelGun | 20 Dec 2021
    E: Realtime compression (A good compression library like Zstandard can make a game less than half the size while taking a tiny amount of CPU power when loading stuff. I think thats a pretty worthwhile trade.) (ZSTD github) (LZ4 github)
  • What's the best way to compress strings?
    6 projects | /r/cpp | 29 Jul 2021
    lz4 for maximum decompression speed, for data that is often read but rarely written
  • How to become a tools/graphics/engine programmer
    2 projects | /r/gameenginedevs | 23 Apr 2021
    Getting lost in material models is tempting. But, at this point you are overdue for working on your own asset pipeline. glTF is great. But, you should learn how to do it yourself. The hardest part will be reading source asset files. The FBX SDK is painful. Assimp isn't great either. Writing your own exporter to your own intermediate text format from Maya or Blender would be good if you are up for it. From whatever source, make your own archive format and binary formats for meshes, animations, textures and scenes. Use https://github.com/lz4/lz4 for compression. You should be able to decompress a list of assets into a big linear array and use them right there with just a bit of pointer fix-up. Minimize the amount of memory you have to touch from start to finish. Data that is going to the GPU (textures, vertex/index buffers) should decompress straight into mapped buffers for fast uploads.
  • LZ4, an Extremely Fast Compression Algorithm
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jan 2021
    I'm not a fan of the stacked bar charts, I like the table of data for "Benchmarks" on the github source page: https://github.com/lz4/lz4

    It makes it very clear where LZ4 fits into comparisons with compression speed, decompression speed and compression ratio

What are some alternatives?

When comparing LZMA and LZ4 you can also consider the following projects:

zstd - Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm

Snappy - A fast compressor/decompressor

brotli - Brotli compression format

ZLib - A massively spiffy yet delicately unobtrusive compression library.

7-Zip-zstd - 7-Zip with support for Brotli, Fast-LZMA2, Lizard, LZ4, LZ5 and Zstandard

LZFSE - LZFSE compression library and command line tool

LZHAM - Lossless data compression codec with LZMA-like ratios but 1.5x-8x faster decompression speed, C/C++

Minizip-ng - Fork of the popular zip manipulation library found in the zlib distribution.