lzbench

Introduction

lzbench is an in-memory benchmarking tool for open-source compressors. It integrates all compressors into a single executable. Initially, an input file is loaded into memory, after which each compressor is used to compress and decompress the file, ensuring the decompressed output matches the original. This method provides the advantage of compiling all compressors with the same compiler and optimizations. However, it requires access to the source code of each compressor, meaning e.g. Slug and lzturbo are not included.

Status

The list of changes in lzbench is available in the CHANGELOG.

Contributor information can be found in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Usage

usage: lzbench [options] input [input2] [input3]

For example:
  lzbench -ezstd filename = selects all levels of zstd
  lzbench -ebrotli,2,5/zstd filename = selects levels 2 & 5 of brotli and zstd
  lzbench -t3,5 fname = 3 sec compression and 5 sec decompression loops
  lzbench -t0,0 -i3,5 fname = 3 compression and 5 decompression iterations
  lzbench -o1c4 fname = output markdown format and sort by 4th column
  lzbench -ezlib -j -r dirname/ = test zlib on all files in directory, recursively

For complete list of options refer to manual in doc directory which contains more detailed documentation.

Building

To compile, you need a C and C++ compiler that is GNUC-compatible, such as GCC, LLVM/Clang, or ICC. It is recommended to use GCC 7.1+ or Clang 6.0+.

For Linux/MacOS/MinGW (Windows):

make -j$(nproc)

The default linking for Linux is dynamic and static for Windows. This can be changed with make BUILD_STATIC=0/1.

For complete building instruction, with troubleshooting refer to BUILD.md.

Supported compressors

The table below lists the supported compressors. The Last update column is the release date of the bundled version. Compressors are built on every CI platform (Linux x86-64/x86-32/ARM64/ARM32/PPC64LE, macOS arm64, Windows MinGW) unless the Notes column says otherwise. Where lzbench carries local build fixes to a codec's sources, the Notes column says so.

Warning: The compressors listed below have security issues and/or are no longer maintained.

Benchmarks

The following results were obtained using lzbench 2.0.1, built with gcc 14.2.0 and executed with the options -eALL -t8,8 -o1c4. The tests were run on a single thread of an AMD EPYC 9554 processor at 3.10 GHz, with the CPU governor set to performance and turbo boost disabled for stability. The operating system was Ubuntu 24.04.1, and the benchmark made use of silesia.tar, which contains tarred files from the Silesia compression corpus.

The results sorted by ratio are available here.