Snappy VS LZ4

Another example of Nim being really fast is the supersnappy library. This library benchmarks faster than Google’s C or C++ Snappy implementation.

It doesn't destroy performance for the simple reason that nowadays memory access has higher latency than pure compute. If you need to use compute to produce some data to be stored in memory, your overall throughput could very well be faster than without compression.

There have been a large amount of innovation on fast compression in recent years. Traditional compression tools like gzip or xz are geared towards higher compression ratio, but memory compression tends to favor speed. Check out those algorithms:

* lz4: https://lz4.github.io/lz4/

* Google's snappy: https://github.com/google/snappy

* Facebook's zstd in fast mode: http://facebook.github.io/zstd/#benchmarks

Google released Snappy, which is extremely fast and robust (both at compression and decompression), but it's definitely not nearly as good (in terms of compression ratio). Google mostly uses it for real-time compression, for example of network messages - not for long-term storage.

Just compress it! Of course if you will you ZIP, players will able to just open this zip file and change whatever they want. But you can use less popular compression algorithms which are not supported by default Windows File Explorer. Snappy for example.

LZ4 is a bit more complicated, but seems faster: https://github.com/lz4/lz4/blob/dev/doc/lz4_Block_format.md

According to these https://github.com/lz4/lz4 values you need around ten (10) quite modern cores in parallel to accomplish around 8GB/s.

The popular NoSQL database Cassandra utilizes a compression algorithm called LZ4 to reduce the footprint of data at rest. LZ4 is characterized by very fast compression speed at the cost of a higher compression ratio. This is a design choice that allows Cassandra to maintain high write throughput while also benefiting from compression in some capacity.

Yeah, sure, when you have monster core counts. on regular systems, not so much, here's from their own github page. it achieves, eh, 5GB/s on memory to memory transfers, i.e. best case scenario. so, uh, no? i'm not even sure it's any better than the CPU decompressor one Nvidia used.

> 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.

Since nobody mentioned it, I'll add lz4 (https://github.com/lz4/lz4).