Mark's a very busy guy at JPL (I'm a former JPLer myself). Making science happen on Mars and whatnot. zlib is super stable and that's largely its biggest bene

Mark's a very busy guy at JPL (I'm a former JPLer myself). Making science happen on Mars and whatnot. zlib is super stable and that's largely its biggest benefit as opposed to when it was originally released in the 90s. Back then, biggest benefit was that it was not impeded by patents or licensing, and, it was faster (in general purpose use) than any other compressors while providing the highest level of compression (in general purpose use). Nowadays bzip2 and lzma (and others) can provide better compression. However, there's lots of choice in compressors (especially open sourced compressors). My favorite for symmetric compression/decompression speed is LZ4 [0] and overall decompression speed over compression ratio. Decompression speed approaches memory copy speed! You can use it for compressing your Linux kernel [1], your ZFS file system [2], and your Linux zram driver [3]. lzo, miniz [4], QuickLZ, LZF, Snappy are also quite speedy in different ways. For compression ratio, it's lzham [5] that is most impressive. But pigz may be more your style. Others may choose brotli, zstd, or others still. [0] https://github.com/lz4/lz4 https://github.com/lz4/lz4 [1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4NjM http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4NjM [2] http://www.open-zfs.org/wiki/Features#lz4_compression http://www.open-zfs.org/wiki/Features#lz4_compression [3] https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.15#head-52af9ef123b7c0792b09a1a0222fdc8c21ab5d4c https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.15#head-52af9ef123b7c0792b... [4] https://github.com/richgel999/miniz https://github.com/richgel999/miniz [5] https://github.com/richgel999/lzham_codec https://github.com/richgel999/lzham_codec