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Does it mean that gzip is a legacy compression than should be replaced with zstd where possible?

by kukx 4y ago

wolf550e 4y ago
Yes, if you control both sides, always use zstd instead of deflate/gzip/zip.
wongarsu 4y ago
Yes. Gzip used to be a decent middle ground when you needed neither super fast compression/decompression nor super high compression ratio, but zstd beats it by a good margin over the whole range from gzip -1 to gzip -9, while offering you a wider range of compression ratios to choose from. And at settings that provide compression ratios comparable to gzip it's blazingly fast. gzip will stay with us because of ubiquity, just as we mostly use image formats from the dot-com era. But if you control both sides, zstd is a big upgrade.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > the whole range from gzip -1 to gzip -9 gzip compression levels are almost useless and typically result in very little actual compression ratio differences, but typically with massive CPU usage differences. zstd doesn't do everything better than gzip though; I believe gzip still offers somewhat faster compression for equal compression ratios last time I looked (but decompression is much faster). I mostly replaced gzip with zstd myself, but there are still scenarios where gzip might be preferable.
  - linuxhansl 4y ago
    In all the testing I have been doing across a variety of use cases, from BigData, to databases, to games, I have not come across a scenario where Zstd is doing worse than Zstd. Compression time CPU is lower for equivalent ratios. Maximum compression is better. Decompression CPU is much lower (i.e. faster), and that is independent of the level used at compression time.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      I did a bunch of testing about five years ago and in some scenarios gzip was a bit faster, but I don't recall which exactly and it was five years ago so things may have changed. I thought I had saved the results somewhere, but I can't find them right now. Overall, zstd still came out as the clear winner (also compared some other compression tools), so I went with that.

Does it mean that gzip is a legacy compression than should be replaced with zstd where possible?

by kukx 4y ago

Does it mean that gzip is a legacy compression than should be replaced with zstd where possible?

wolf550e 4y ago

Yes, if you control both sides, always use zstd instead of deflate/gzip/zip.

wongarsu 4y ago

Yes. Gzip used to be a decent middle ground when you needed neither super fast compression/decompression nor super high compression ratio, but zstd beats it by a good margin over the whole range from gzip -1 to gzip -9, while offering you a wider range of compression ratios to choose from. And at settings that provide compression ratios comparable to gzip it's blazingly fast. gzip will stay with us because of ubiquity, just as we mostly use image formats from the dot-com era. But if you control both sides, zstd is a big upgrade.

Beltalowda 4y ago
> the whole range from gzip -1 to gzip -9 gzip compression levels are almost useless and typically result in very little actual compression ratio differences, but typically with massive CPU usage differences. zstd doesn't do everything better than gzip though; I believe gzip still offers somewhat faster compression for equal compression ratios last time I looked (but decompression is much faster). I mostly replaced gzip with zstd myself, but there are still scenarios where gzip might be preferable.
- linuxhansl 4y ago
  In all the testing I have been doing across a variety of use cases, from BigData, to databases, to games, I have not come across a scenario where Zstd is doing worse than Zstd. Compression time CPU is lower for equivalent ratios. Maximum compression is better. Decompression CPU is much lower (i.e. faster), and that is independent of the level used at compression time.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    I did a bunch of testing about five years ago and in some scenarios gzip was a bit faster, but I don't recall which exactly and it was five years ago so things may have changed. I thought I had saved the results somewhere, but I can't find them right now. Overall, zstd still came out as the clear winner (also compared some other compression tools), so I went with that.