Facebook Zstandard “zstd” & “pzstd” Data Compression Tools Deliver High Performance & Efficiency

Ubuntu 16.04 and – I assume – other recent operating systems are still using single-thread version of file & data compression utilities such as bzip2 or gzip by default, but I’ve recently learned that compatible multi-threaded compression tools such as lbzip2, pigz or pixz have been around for a while, and you can replace the default tools by them for much faster compression and decompression on multi-core systems. This post led to further discussion about Facebook’s Zstandard 1.0 promising both smaller and faster data compression speed. The implementation is open source, released under a BSD license, and offers both zstd single threaded tool, and pzstd multi-threaded tool. So we all started to do own little tests and were impressed by the results. Some concerns were raised about patents, and development is still work-in-progess with a few bugs here and there including pzstd segfaulting on ARM.

Zstd vs Zlib Compression Ratio vs Speed
Zstd vs Zlib Compression Ratio vs Speed

Zlib has 9 levels of compression, while Zstd has 19, so Facebook has tested all compression levels and their speed, and drawn the chart above comparing compression speed to compression ratio for all test points, and Zstd is clearly superior to zlib here.

They’ve also compared compression and decompression performance and aspect ratio for various other competing fast algorithms using lzbench to perform this from memory to prevent I/O bottleneck from storage devices.

Name Ratio C.speed D.speed
MB/s MB/s
zstd 1.0.0 -1 2.877 330 940
zlib 1.2.8 -1 2.730 95 360
brotli 0.4 -0 2.708 320 375
QuickLZ 1.5 2.237 510 605
LZO 2.09 2.106 610 870
LZ4 r131 2.101 620 3100
Snappy 1.1.3 2.091 480 1600
LZF 3.6 2.077 375 790

Again everything is a comprise, but Zstd is faster than algorithms with similar compression ratio, and has a higher compression ratio than faster algorithm.

But let’s not just trust Facebook, and instead try ourselves. The latest release is version 1.1.2, so that’s what I tried in my Ubuntu 16.04 machine:


This will install the latest stable release of zstd to your system, but the multi-thread is not build by default:


There are quite a lot of options for zstd:


Since we are going to compare results to other, I’ll also flush the file cache before each compression and decompression using:


I’ll use the default settings to compress Linux mainline directory stored in a hard drive with tar + zstd (single thread):

and pzstd (multiple threads):


Bear in mind that some time is lost due to I/O on the hard drive, but I wanted to test a real use case here, and if you want to specifically compare the raw performance of compressor you should use lzbench. Now let’s decompress the Zstandard tarballs:


My machine is based on an AMD FX8350 octa-core processor, and we can clearly see that by comparing real and user time, the test is mostly I/O bound. I’ve repeated those test with other multi-threaded tools as shown in the summary table below.

Compression Decompression File Size (bytes) Compression Ratio
Tools Time (s) “User” Time (s) Time (s) “User” Time (s)
ztsd 130.056 91.608 45.124 21.26 1,881,020,744 1.48
pzstd 58.929 86.56 38.175 23.39 1,883,697,296 1.48
lbzip2 84.216 353.84 37.109 167.416 1,855,837,345 1.50
pigz 61.121 121.332 34.36 15.26 1,903,915,372 1.47
pixz 177.596 1233.88 36.24 78.116 1,782,756,524 1.57
pzstd -19 275.361 1939.536 26.85 21.832 1,794,035,552 1.56

I’ve included both “real time” and “user time”, as the latter shows how much CPU time the task has spent on all the cores of the system. If user time is large that means the task required lots of CPU power, and if a task completes in about the same amount of “real time”, but a lower “user time”, it means it was likely more efficient, and consumes less power. pigz is the multi-threaded version of xz algorithm relying on lzma compression which delivers a high compression ratio, at the expense of longer compression time, so I also run pzstd with level 19 compression to compare:


Zstandard compression ratio is similar to the one of lbzip2 with default settings, but compression is quite faster, and much more power efficient. Compared to gzip, (p)zstd offers a better compression ratio, against with default settings, and somewhat comparable performance. pixz offers the best compression ratio, but takes a lot more time to compress, and uses more resources to decompress compared to Zstandard and Pigz. Pzstd with compression level 19 takes even more time to compress, and is getting close to pixz compression, but has the advantage of being much faster to decompress.

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12 Replies to “Facebook Zstandard “zstd” & “pzstd” Data Compression Tools Deliver High Performance & Efficiency”

  1. I used zstd to demonstrate a ‘backup/clone internal eMMC of an SBC to a remote machine’ use case. Usually this process is bottlenecked by both CPU (to compress data) and IO (speed to read from the device) but depending on acting on ‘real data’ or unused space (zeroed out) it’s most of the times either/or.

    So by using single-threaded zstd (on ARM pzstd doesn’t work currently) and adding parallelisms manually it can be ensured that both backup time and archive size needed decrease.

    All details: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/2096-backup-script-for-block-devices/?p=21729

  2. @Jay
    Ahem, .7z is more of a container than a ‘format’ since 7-zip supports various compression schemes (LZMA/LZMA2, PPMd, BZip2 and even more — for example optimized ZIP/deflate or even zstandard, just do a web search for ‘7-zip zstandard’).

    As used most of the times .7z means LZMA2 so you can easily compare yourself with .xz (see first link in the blog post for pixz results).

  3. @cnxsoft
    Performance of xz utilities and 7za/7zr is almost the same with identical compression settings. But you need pixz to get multithreaded behaviour and then there might be slight speed differences. IMO not worth the efforts to test/compare given the availability of zstandard now 😉

  4. hi, i did quick script to compare different parallel compressors. cpu was core2duo @ 2.4ghz, machine was a linux64 vm running on win7_64. os was standard jessie install without any optimizations. all tools were from jessie, only zstd was compiled from source sid package. apparently zstd isnt the best one if you prefer compression ratio. with pixz you can get more at almost any compression level (only with lowest zstd was better at speed, but since you dont usually run hundreds of compression threads i guess it doesnt matter). test files were a /system partition of my android 4.4.2 for h3 build). results:

    http://31.135.195.151:20280/d/compression-algorithms-benchmark/results.png (1800×10000 img)

    i’m planning to redo the tests on a20 or h3 allwinner soc.

  5. kc :
    i’m planning to redo the tests on a20 or h3 allwinner soc.

    And then you know why pixz simply doesn’t matter and why zstd rocks (I don’t write about pzstd for a reason).

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Khadas VIM4 SBC
Khadas VIM4 SBC