Lizard (formerly LZ5) is a lossless compression algorithm which contains 4 compression methods:
- fastLZ4 : compression levels -10...-19 are designed to give better decompression speed than LZ4 i.e. over 2000 MB/s
- LIZv1 : compression levels -20...-29 are designed to give better ratio than LZ4 keeping 75% decompression speed
- fastLZ4 + Huffman : compression levels -30...-39 add Huffman coding to fastLZ4
- LIZv1 + Huffman : compression levels -40...-49 give the best ratio (comparable to zlib and low levels of zstd/brotli) at decompression speed of 1000 MB/s
Lizard library is based on frequently used LZ4 library by Yann Collet but the Lizard compression format is not compatible with LZ4. Lizard library is provided as open-source software using BSD 2-Clause license. The high compression/decompression speed is achieved without any SSE and AVX extensions.
| Branch | Status |
|---|---|
| lz5_v1.5 |  |
| lizard |  |
The following results are obtained with lzbench and -t16,16
using 1 core of Intel Core i5-4300U, Windows 10 64-bit (MinGW-w64 compilation under gcc 6.2.0)
with silesia.tar which contains tarred files from Silesia compression corpus.
| Compressor name | Compression | Decompress. | Compr. size | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| memcpy | 7332 MB/s | 8719 MB/s | 211947520 | 100.00 |
| lz4 1.7.3 | 440 MB/s | 2318 MB/s | 100880800 | 47.60 |
| lz4hc 1.7.3 -1 | 98 MB/s | 2121 MB/s | 87591763 | 41.33 |
| lz4hc 1.7.3 -4 | 55 MB/s | 2259 MB/s | 79807909 | 37.65 |
| lz4hc 1.7.3 -9 | 22 MB/s | 2315 MB/s | 77892285 | 36.75 |
| lz4hc 1.7.3 -12 | 17 MB/s | 2323 MB/s | 77849762 | 36.73 |
| lz4hc 1.7.3 -16 | 10 MB/s | 2323 MB/s | 77841782 | 36.73 |
| lizard 1.0 -10 | 346 MB/s | 2610 MB/s | 103402971 | 48.79 |
| lizard 1.0 -12 | 103 MB/s | 2458 MB/s | 86232422 | 40.69 |
| lizard 1.0 -15 | 50 MB/s | 2552 MB/s | 81187330 | 38.31 |
| lizard 1.0 -19 | 3.04 MB/s | 2497 MB/s | 77416400 | 36.53 |
| lizard 1.0 -21 | 157 MB/s | 1795 MB/s | 89239174 | 42.10 |
| lizard 1.0 -23 | 30 MB/s | 1778 MB/s | 81097176 | 38.26 |
| lizard 1.0 -26 | 6.63 MB/s | 1734 MB/s | 74503695 | 35.15 |
| lizard 1.0 -29 | 1.37 MB/s | 1634 MB/s | 68694227 | 32.41 |
| lizard 1.0 -30 | 246 MB/s | 909 MB/s | 85727429 | 40.45 |
| lizard 1.0 -32 | 94 MB/s | 1244 MB/s | 76929454 | 36.30 |
| lizard 1.0 -35 | 47 MB/s | 1435 MB/s | 73850400 | 34.84 |
| lizard 1.0 -39 | 2.94 MB/s | 1502 MB/s | 69807522 | 32.94 |
| lizard 1.0 -41 | 126 MB/s | 961 MB/s | 76100661 | 35.91 |
| lizard 1.0 -43 | 28 MB/s | 1101 MB/s | 70955653 | 33.48 |
| lizard 1.0 -46 | 6.25 MB/s | 1073 MB/s | 65413061 | 30.86 |
| lizard 1.0 -49 | 1.27 MB/s | 1064 MB/s | 60679215 | 28.63 |
| zlib 1.2.8 -1 | 66 MB/s | 244 MB/s | 77259029 | 36.45 |
| zlib 1.2.8 -6 | 20 MB/s | 263 MB/s | 68228431 | 32.19 |
| zlib 1.2.8 -9 | 8.37 MB/s | 266 MB/s | 67644548 | 31.92 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -1 | 235 MB/s | 645 MB/s | 73659468 | 34.75 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -2 | 181 MB/s | 600 MB/s | 70168955 | 33.11 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -5 | 88 MB/s | 565 MB/s | 65002208 | 30.67 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -8 | 31 MB/s | 619 MB/s | 61026497 | 28.79 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -11 | 16 MB/s | 613 MB/s | 59523167 | 28.08 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -15 | 4.97 MB/s | 639 MB/s | 58007773 | 27.37 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -18 | 2.87 MB/s | 583 MB/s | 55294241 | 26.09 |
| zstd 1.1.1 -22 | 1.44 MB/s | 505 MB/s | 52731930 | 24.88 |
| brotli 0.5.2 -0 | 217 MB/s | 244 MB/s | 78226979 | 36.91 |
| brotli 0.5.2 -2 | 96 MB/s | 283 MB/s | 68066621 | 32.11 |
| brotli 0.5.2 -5 | 24 MB/s | 312 MB/s | 60801716 | 28.69 |
| brotli 0.5.2 -8 | 5.56 MB/s | 324 MB/s | 57382470 | 27.07 |
| brotli 0.5.2 -11 | 0.39 MB/s | 266 MB/s | 51138054 | 24.13 |
The raw Lizard block compression format is detailed within lizard_Block_format.
To compress an arbitrarily long file or data stream, multiple blocks are required. Organizing these blocks and providing a common header format to handle their content is the purpose of the Frame format, defined into lizard_Frame_format. Interoperable versions of Lizard must respect this frame format.