Zstd compression levels

1. How much does zstd compress?
2. Is zstd better than gzip?
3. Is zstd lossless?
4. Is LZ4 better than zstd?

How much does zstd compress?

These improvements translate directly to faster data transfer and smaller storage requirements. In other words, compared with zlib, Zstandard scales: At the same compression ratio, it compresses substantially faster: ~3-5x. At the same compression speed, it is substantially smaller: 10-15 percent smaller.

Is zstd better than gzip?

Experiment proved, ZSTD Level 9 and Level 19 are able to reduce Parquet file size by 8% and 12% compared to GZIP-based Parquet files, respectively. Moreover, both ZSTD Level 9 and Level 19 have decompression speeds faster than GZIP level 6.

Is zstd lossless?

Zstandard, commonly known by the name of its reference implementation zstd, is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook.

Is LZ4 better than zstd?

Larger is better! At the current compression ratios, reading with decompression for LZ4 and ZSTD is actually faster than reading decompressed: significantly less data is coming from the IO subsystem. We know LZ4 is significantly faster than ZSTD on standalone benchmarks: likely bottleneck is ROOT IO API.