Zstandard (zstd)

A real-time compression algorithm with a wide tunable range.

Zstandard (zstd) offers very fast compression and decompression with ratios competitive with much slower algorithms. The tunable compression level from 1 (fastest) to 22 (best ratio) lets users pick the right point on the speed/ratio curve; levels 1-3 typically beat gzip on both speed and ratio simultaneously, and the higher levels approach or exceed xz for some workloads.

Yann Collet wrote zstd at Meta (Facebook), drawing on the earlier LZ4 algorithm and on insights from xz/LZMA. It was open sourced in 2016 under a BSD/GPL dual licence. zstd has been in the Linux kernel since 4.14 (2017), in Btrfs as a compression option, in tar via "tar --zstd", and as a transport in zstd- aware tools like Borg and rsync.

zstd has become the modern default for new applications that need general-purpose compression: package managers (Arch's .tar.zst packages, RPM .rpm.zst), CI build artefacts, network protocols, and a growing share of file-format compression. The streaming dictionary feature is particularly useful for compressing many small messages.

License: BSD-3-Clause OR GPL-2.0-only

Category: CLI tools

Website: https://facebook.github.io/zstd/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install zstd
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install zstd
Arch:          sudo pacman -S zstd
macOS:         brew install zstd

Authors

Yann Collet (creator, at Meta)
Facebook / Meta and contributors

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