I don't use Iguana in particular, but zstd and lz4 in Marginalia Search. First, I use it to store and retrieve crawl data faster. Mechanical hard drives are mu

I don't use Iguana in particular, but zstd and lz4 in Marginalia Search. First, I use it to store and retrieve crawl data faster. Mechanical hard drives are much slower than these decompression algorithms. So for sequential access, you can make a cheap mechanical drive faster and bigger as big as long as you've got some CPU cycles to spare to decode the data. (This is also true for network, basically anything outside of RAM, as long as it's nice and sequential, there's probably an argument for compressing it) I also use them to keep more stuff in RAM than what should be possible. I do transparent compression/decompression of some large strings e.g. document HTML that typically compresses with a factor 10x. These algorithms are so fast the performance hit of decompressing the strings as they're used is like a 10% pessimization of the run time for significantly slashing the RAM usage.