Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer

Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer ( LZO for short ) is an algorithm for lossless all-purpose data compression that achieves a comparatively high speed when unpacking. It is a dictionary algorithm that was developed by Markus Franz Xaver Johannes Oberhumer on the basis of the developments by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv .

An early variant of the algorithm was first published in March 1996 in the Internet newsgroups “comp.compression” and “comp.compression.research”.

features

The algorithm is designed for real-time use and dispenses with a higher packing rate in favor of the highest processing speeds. This library also provides asymmetric properties with settings for more thorough compression while maintaining the same decompression speed. Largely independent of the compressor settings, the decompressor typically delivers a multiple of the data throughput of gzip.

Depending on the setting, the compression requires between 8 and normally 64 to 256 kBytes of memory. LZO processes data in blocks of 256 kBytes.

commitment

The reference implementation is a small (~ 5 kB), thread-safe program library written in ISO / ANSI - C and a tool based on it called lzop ("the Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer Packer") that behaves like gzip apart from a few details . Both are distributed as free software, also in source code, under the terms of the GNU General Public License . In addition to the C implementation of the library, there are also implementations in Perl , Python and Java . It is implemented independently of the platform and has been successfully compiled and operated on a large number of different platforms. Under all popular Linux distributions , it can be installed directly from the standard package repositories with the integrated package management . lzop can be used with the GNU implementation of tar from version 1.21 from December 27, 2008 with a specially created option ( ) directly from the program. LZO compression is integrated as a standard algorithm in UPX . In Apache's Hadoop framework, LZO compression can be integrated with an additional module. Many compressing file systems such as btrfs , ZFS and UBIFS use LZO or one of the available options. Software like OpenVPN can compress your data transmissions through computer networks with LZO. The Linux kernel supports LZO. --lzop

In many cases, the LZO compression can be significantly faster than the data throughput of other links in the processing chain, so that the additional use ultimately leads to a gain in performance, since relieving the weaker chain links by reducing the data volume beforehand using LZO saves more effort than the LZO- Compression needed. For example, LZO is many times faster than conventional encryption algorithms. Such (naturally content-dependent) savings are particularly profitable when a bottleneck arises, since other links in the processing chain have to wait for the weakest link. Since LZO decompression is usually significantly faster than hard disk read speed, program starts can be accelerated by using UPX, for example.