Zstandard (zstd)
Zstandard (zstd) is the modern compression algorithm developed by Facebook, surpassing zlib on both speed and ratio, with an extremely wide range of compression levels and trained dictionaries.
Purpose
It serves as a general-purpose replacement for zlib and gzip, offering a better speed-ratio trade-off at every level, with pre-trained dictionaries to improve small-data compression.
Mechanism
An LZ77 variant (FSE finite-state entropy coding with a Huffman fallback) plus a large sliding window and optional dictionary. FSE comes closer to the entropy rate than Huffman at comparable speed.
Use cases
- File system compression
- Database page compression
- General-purpose file archiving