Google Publishes Zopfli, an Open-Source Compression Library

alphadogg writes "Google is open-sourcing a new general purpose data compression library called Zopfli that can be used to speed up Web downloads. The Zopfli Compression Algorithm, which got its name from a Swiss bread recipe, is an implementation of the Deflate compression algorithm that creates a smaller output size (PDF) compared to previous techniques, wrote Lode Vandevenne, a software engineer with Google's Compression Team, on the Google Open Source Blog on Thursday. 'The smaller compressed size allows for better space utilization, faster data transmission, and lower Web page load latencies. Furthermore, the smaller compressed size has additional benefits in mobile use, such as lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use,' Vandevenne wrote. The more exhaustive compression techniques achieve higher data density, but also make the compression a lot slower. This does not affect the decompression speed though, Vandenne wrote."

Comments

Re:Overhyped

[Baloroth]

Actually, they state that the 3-8% better maximum compression than zlib is 2-3 orders of magnitude longer to compress.

I can't imagine what kind of content you're hosting that'd justify 3 orders of magnitude compression time to gain 3% compression.

Static content that only has to be compressed once, yet is downloaded hundreds of thousands or millions of times. 3-8% is a pretty significant savings in that case.